Panhard

Émile Levassor is gripping a primitive steering tiller, his face coated in road grit and unburned oil, wrestling a vibrating, rudimentary machine through the perilous French night. It is June 1895, and the inaugural Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race is tearing across an unpaved, brutal countryside. Driving entirely solo, Levassor is subjecting his body to forty-eight torturous hours and forty-five minutes of deafening mechanical clatter from his 1.2-litre (73 cu in) Phenix twin-cylinder engine. He averages an astonishing 24 km/h (15 mph) over 1178 km (732 miles), defying absolute physical exhaustion to secure a monumental victory. This was not merely an endurance race; it was the violent, fiery genesis of the modern motorcar, forged by the most pioneering marque of its epoch: Panhard et Levassor.

Before the nineteenth century drew to a close, automobiles were effectively horse carriages with heavy, asthmatic industrial engines bolted wherever space allowed. René Panhard and Émile Levassor, initially highly successful manufacturers of woodworking machinery, changed the trajectory of human transport forever. Their breakthrough was underpinned by a fortuitous alliance. Levassor’s close friend, Edouard Sarazin, held the French licensing rights to Gottlieb Daimler’s internal combustion engines. Upon Sarazin’s sudden death, his widow Louise inherited the patents; she subsequently married Levassor, cementing a legendary engineering partnership. By 1891, the firm had conceived the “Système Panhard”, an architectural blueprint that would define automotive engineering for a century. They unceremoniously shoved the engine to the front, placing it beneath a protective bonnet, and routed the power to the rear wheels via a pedal-operated clutch and a sliding-mesh gearbox.

Priced at 3500 francs, this revolutionary layout was undeniably crude, requiring sheer physical force and mechanical sympathy to swap cogs without shattering the hardened steel teeth. Yet, it established a dynamic balance that simply worked. Panhard et Levassor did not just build motorcars; they invented the fundamental grammar of driving, introducing front-mounted radiators and, via Alfred Vacheron’s 1894 racing entry, one of the earliest employments of a steering wheel.

However, the early pursuit of speed exacted a heavy toll. During the furious 1896 Paris-Marseille-Paris race, Levassor swerved violently to avoid a stray dog, suffering severe injuries in a crash that would ultimately claim his life the following year. It was a devastating blow, yet the firm possessed an indomitable momentum. Commandant Arthur Constantin Krebs assumed the technical mantle, propelling the company into an era of immense profitability. Krebs was an undisputed visionary. He engineered the “Panhard rod”, a transverse suspension linkage of such sublime, brutal simplicity—anchoring a live axle to the chassis to arrest lateral movement—that it remains in use beneath high-performance track cars and rugged off-roaders today.

As the dawn of the twentieth century gave way to the roaring twenties, Panhard pivoted from the deafening clatter of poppet valves to the eerie, velvety thrust of Knight sleeve-valve engines. The sensation of a massive sleeve-valve Panhard operating at wide-open throttle was unlike anything else on the road: a deep, frictionless rush of torque unaccompanied by the typical mechanical thrash. This silky delivery did not preclude absolute ferocity. In 1925, a bespoke 4.8-litre (292 cu in) aerodynamic Panhard special arrived at the vertiginous concrete banking of the Linas-Montlhéry circuit. It howled around the high-speed bowl, obliterating the world record by sustaining an average of 185.51 km/h (115.26 mph) for a full hour. A decade later, George Eyston’s fearsome 35CV 8-cylinder continued the onslaught, claiming swathes of endurance records on that very same sun-baked concrete.

The ashes of the Second World War left France’s heavy luxury car industry completely economically unviable, forcing Panhard into a radical metamorphosis. The grand, heavy leviathans were replaced by a profound exercise in aerodynamic witchcraft and extreme weight-saving. Enter the eccentric genius of aesthetic designer Louis Bionier and the mechanical sorcery of engineer Louis Delagarde. Delagarde binned the massive iron blocks in favour of a tiny, jewel-like, air-cooled horizontally opposed twin-cylinder engine. Bionier sculpted the wind. Inspired by his wartime aerodynamic studies, he penned the astonishing 1948 Dynavia concept, which boasted a drag coefficient of just 0.26—a figure that shames many modern sports cars. This teardrop philosophy birthed the Dyna Z and the PL 17, peculiar aluminium-clad saloons that sliced through the air, permitting a 42 hp engine to maintain a whisper-quiet 130 km/h (80 mph) cruising speed whilst carrying six adults in immense comfort.

This maniacal dedication to aerodynamic purity and internal friction reduction turned Panhard into a terror in mid-century motorsport. The tiny 850 cc (51.9 cu in) flat-twin engine was a masterpiece of thermal efficiency, featuring cylinder heads cast in one piece with the barrels and a crankshaft running on ultra-low-friction roller bearings. It would rev freely and aggressively past 6000 rpm, emitting a furious, rhythmic thrum. In the hands of René Bonnet and Charles Deutsch, these engines powered the DB Panhards to utterly humiliate heavy, large-displacement sports cars, securing three consecutive overall Index of Performance victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans from 1950 to 1952, and again in 1962. The ultimate validation of Panhard’s lightweight philosophy arrived on the treacherous, snow-covered alpine passes of the 1961 Monte Carlo Rally, where the gutsy PL 17 Tigre secured an outrageous 1-2-3 overall sweep against vastly superior machinery.

The final chapter of Panhard’s passenger car history was a stunning piece of mid-century industrial art: the 1964 Panhard 24 CT. It was a razor-sharp, exceptionally low-slung 2+2 coupé that looked like it had driven straight out of a science fiction storyboard. Bionier’s styling was youthful and aggressive, wrapping around a tubular chassis that weighed a mere 840 kg (1852 lbs). The heavily tuned 848 cc (51.75 cu in) boxer twin now produced 60 hp (SAE), punching the flyweight machine to top speeds approaching 160 km/h (100 mph). Inside, it featured a luxuriously padded dashboard, standard seatbelts, and highly advanced disc brakes tucked behind the distinctive wheels. Yet, despite its brilliance, the financial realities of independent carmaking were grim. Citroën, having progressively acquired shares, entirely absorbed the civilian division in 1967, extinguishing the marque’s passenger lineage to free up factory space. The Panhard badge survived exclusively on heavy military armour, but the high-revving, pioneering spirit of Levassor’s dream had finally crossed its ultimate finish line.