The Fast Times of Albert Champion: From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, an Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal by Peter Joffre Nye

Author:Peter Joffre Nye
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Autobiography, Transportation, Motorcycles, Non-Fiction, Automotive, Bicycles, Historical, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781616149642
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

As he recovered, he received lucrative offers. Desgrange hired him to race on the Parc des Princes against Bruni, Walthour, and others through the end of October.

An offer—an appearance fee likely around $1,000—to race came from Dresden, one of Germany’s most beautiful cities,149 and Champion accepted. On a frosty and blustery October 9, Champion bundled up in wool tights, leather gloves, and his tricolor for 100 kilometers against German wunderkind Thaddeus Robl, Englishman Tommy Hall, and French compatriot César Simar. He lapped Robl seventeen times to even the score from their Berlin contest, and he buried the others even deeper. Champion crushed them.

Back in France on the last Sunday in October, Champion entered his final race at the Parc des Princes.150 He paced behind Franz Hoffmann. Trained in Germany as a mechanical engineer, Hoffmann loved the motors and had gained a reputation in Germany, France, and America as a master in the art of pace driving. He had fine facial features and a small chin. In his cloth cap and leather jacket, he sat ensconced squarely upright over the rear wheel. He had led Robl to dozens of victories and Walthour to triumph at the London world championships. Hoffmann had paced Basil De Guichard to win thirty-nine races and Harry Elkes to win his last ten rides. In Elkes’s fatal race, his last words to Hoff-mann had been to speed up.

Champion won. Thousands of Parisians and a contingent of American expats surrounding the Parc des Princes oval gave him a rousing valedictory victory lap. He waved his clutch of flowers at everyone. “La Marseillaise” filled the air for his benefit for the umpteenth time.

Soon came an invitation to leave Paris for New York to ride an exhibition race against Tommy Hall at the next Madison Square Garden six-day.151 However enticing, he had seen former idol Bouhours downgraded to a no-hoper. Champion’s own receding hairline reminded him every day that his physical powers were on the wane. He opted to retire at the crest of la gloire!

It was time to disengage from his skein of a thousand races and exhibitions, to make a fresh career shift. The wised up were gravitating to autos. Des-grange’s nemesis, Le Vélo, ten years old, surrendered in the circulation war and became Le Journal de l’Automobile.152

Champion stayed in Paris.153 He apprenticed himself to auto companies to research how engines were built. His new endeavor was to become the sole US agent importing engine parts from French manufacturers.

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