The History
The Challenge
Sponsors
The Challenge
car
peking

On the 31st January 1907, the Paris newspaper Le Matin issued what it called “A Stupendous Challenge”. The supreme use of the automobile is that it makes long journeys possible.  Its effect is to make man the master of distance.  Its appeal is that it opens up to us journeys hitherto undreamed of.  But all we have done is make it go round in circles. What would we say if the railway companies descended to pitting the noble locomotives of, say, the Orient Express and the Nord Express into a dash round the Inner Circle?  When the trains which go to Constantinople and St Petersburg had finished 150 circuits of Paris what progress would have been registered? The whole raison d’etre of cars is that they make possible the most ambitious and unpremeditated trips to far horizons.  For this reason the general public fails to see the logic of making motor-cars chase their tails in tight circles. We believe that the motor industry, the finest industry in France, has the right to claim a wider field in which to demonstrate its potential.  Progress does not emerge from backing mediocrity or routine. What needs to be proved to day is that as long as a man has a car he can do anything and go anywhere. After the event, [Le Matin] wrote:  “On the whole the Peking to Paris race has proved conclusively that the motor car is a much stronger and more resistant machine than has so far been thought and that the usual inconveniences of automobilism, and the frequent breakdowns from which tourists suffer, the breakages and repeated disasters to the machines, are due rather to carelessness or want of skill in chauffeurs than to any congenital weakness of the car itself.  It may therefore be said that this industry has arrived near its perfection, and that varied and novel practical uses of the motor car are possible, for regular communications, for service in distant places, and for transport by road.  But we must improve our drivers!”

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