The French were the first real automobilistes for they understood that this new form of mobility was both empowering and chic. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was a huge flowering of mechanical imagination as both garagistes and bigger factories innovated and designed new cars, though many offered eccentric mechanical features that were doomed to fail.
Levallois-Perret in the northwestern suburbs of Paris was the site of much of this engineering ferment, and there the Salmson factory inhabited a works in the wonderfully named rue Point du Jour (‘Street of Dawn’), producing lissom 1100cc sports cars. Salmson was a proper engineering firm, making aero engines and industrial tools, which is perhaps why its car was the best of this new breed.
Light and elegant, with a body style that echoed the far more pricey racing Bugattis, the Salmsons were powered by a beautiful and advanced twin-cam engine and put up remarkable performances at Le Mans and Brooklands where, in 1927, the works’ supercharged car could lap at more than 100mph. They were the natural competitors of the Amilcar, which had similar sporting looks but a much cruder engine. (The dancer Isadora Duncan was in fact in an Amilcar, not a Bugatti as is often said, when she died, throttled by a trailing scarf.)
Salmsons offered sports-car looks and excitement to many for the first time (MG in Britain was almost ten years behind Salmson in offering a light series-produced two-seater), and they set the scene for a type of leisure vehicle that is represented today by cars such as the Mazda MX-5.
Emile Petit, the designer, with one of the works’ twin-cam cars at the Miramas circuit, southern France, 1924.
A supercharged Salmson ‘San Sebastian’ model. An impromptu car show at Chiswick during the Boat Race, 1927.