{"id":497792,"date":"2018-09-07T14:53:37","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T21:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportscardigest.com\/\/?p=64654"},"modified":"2024-12-27T12:59:07","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T12:59:07","slug":"forgotten-vanderbilt-winner-1906-darracq-120","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/forgotten-vanderbilt-winner-1906-darracq-120\/","title":{"rendered":"1906 Darracq 120 – The Forgotten Vanderbilt Winner"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Louis Wagner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[dropcap]S[\/dropcap]eeing the Darracq 120 racer that Louis Wagner (also a pioneer aviator) drove to victory\u00a0in the 1906 Vanderbilt Cup race in Wallace McNair’s shed in Hamilton, New Zealand, felt a little like finding a Rembrandt at a garage sale. The car ranks up there with Ray Harroun’s Marmon Wasp, the first Indianapolis 500 winner, for historical significance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike Harroun\u2019s Wasp though, which has been lovingly cared for at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame museum over many years, this historically pivotal machine wound up half a world away from its home in France and long forgotten. And sadly, so is the story of how the car got to New Zealand in the first place.<\/p>\n

More often then not, a racecar that is a few years old is just regarded as obsolete, and relegated to a shed somewhere. They are generally not worth much, and they can\u2019t be driven on the street, so no one cares until they age a bit, and their historical significance becomes more apparent.<\/p>\n

But in this case, if winning the Vanderbilt Cup weren’t enough to make the car important, another bit of information that is well documented makes the racer even more illustrious, and that is the fact that it was also land-speed-record-setter Sir Malcolm Campbell’s original Blue Bird! He named the machine after a play he had seen. Of course, the car’s French racing blue paint job may have been an inspiration too. It was Campbell who added the third sparkplug on each cylinder, no doubt to try to get a more complete burn out of the low octane fuel across the huge pistons of the machine.<\/p>\n

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The original car came with two plugs per cylinder but Sir Malcolm Campbell added a third when he owned the car.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can see the third plugs on each cylinder in some of the photos I took back in 2004, but restorer Wallace McNair removed them later as you can see in more current pictures. And today the car has been modified in minor ways, such as the pan under the engine to collect the oil from its total loss system in order to make it usable on modern tracks, but in all but the most minor details it is as it came from the Darracq works originally.
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\nThis legendary Darracq also competed in the very first French Grand Prix, at Le Mans, on June 26-27, 1906. The rules stipulated that the car could weigh no more than 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) plus a seven-kilogram allowance for magneto and dynamo. The event was run on a 64-mile circuit and consisted of six laps on each of two days. The Darracq was up against the likes of Fiat, Clement Bayard, Mercedes and Locomobile but had to retire with engine problems after two laps. That race was won by Ferenc Szisz in a Renault AK 90CV doing an average speed of 62.88 miles per hour.<\/p>\n