• What makes the final race for Gordon Bennett's nearly 45-pound silver trophy memorable one hundred years later is the role the brothers Edouard and Andre Michelin played and how, to assure the "excellence" of their tires, they devised a new tactic for motorsports competition - the first pit stop. The race's recent centenary drew some 150 vintage vehicles to the Puy-de-Dome region of central France, where volcanic hills punctuate the horizon and showed what goes around, comes around, even 100 years later..
  

Grand Prix auto racing may be the epitome of modern motorsports, but if you trace its trail back to the beginning, you discover that it all began because the scion of New York newspapering couldn't keep his pants zipped.

It was at his future in-laws' New Year's party in 1877 that James Gordon Bennett Jr. became so drunk that when he heard the call of Nature, he simply unzipped right there in front of friends and (future) family and urinated into the fireplace.

"Gordon Bennett!" the British still exclaim after they've seen something particularly shocking or unnerving.

Gordon Bennett Jr. was in his mid-20s when he took over his father's newspaper, The New York Herald, and in his mid-30s when his behavior became such a scandal that he was banished from polite society and sailed off to Europe (in his private yacht, the 301-foot Lysistrata). From Europe, he managed the newspaper via trans-Atlantic cable (it was Gordon Bennett Jr. who presumed to send reporter Henry M. Stanley on a two-year quest to find the missing missionary Dr. David Livingstone).

Gordon Bennett Jr. gave us the Sunday paper and appreciated sports - and the publics' interest in them - to the point of making athletics a major focus of coverage. He also liked the newfangled motorcar. As early as 1895, he and William K. Vanderbilt provided funding for a race from Paris to Bordeaux. Gordon Bennett Jr. promoted his new English-language Paris Herald newspaper by offering the Coupe Internationale, an international automobile race more commonly known as the Gordon Bennett Cup because of the nearly 45-pound silver trophy he commissioned as the winner's prize.

However, in a protest that would set a precedent for the sport's future, displeasure with the rules - which restricted entries to three vehicles per nation -- led to the staging of the first Grand Prix, at Le Mans in 1906, and thus set the wheels rolling for what we know now as Formula One.

Gordon Bennett's cup was open to competitors from any nation in which automobiles were produced. The inaugural event took place in June 1900 on a course from Paris to Lyons and drew entries from several countries, including Germany and the United States.

Only five cars actually started and just two reached the finish. Fernand Charron of France won, though his Panhard struggled the final 10 miles after hitting a dog. Leorce Girardot, also in a French Panhard, was second, reportedly slowed by damage after his car struck a horse.

France was host to the cup competition again in 1901, when the event was run as part of the Paris to Bordeaux race and was won by Girardot. In 1902, the Gordon Bennett Cup truly became international with a course that crossed international borders as it ran from Paris through Switzerland and on to Vienna.

When a British car, a Napier driven by Selwyn Edge, won, it was decided to allow England to host the 1903 event. Racing on roads already had been banded in England, but Parliament passed an act allowing the race to be held in a less populated area of Ireland, where Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy posted the first major international motorsports victory for Mercedes, though many participants were not happy with the way the German automaker circumvented the rules by entering three cars under its own banner and three more under the Austrian flag as Austro-Daimlers.

The 1904 event was held in Germany's Taunus Forest, drew entries from eight countries and was considered the single most important motorsports event on the European continent that year. Frenchman Leon Thery, driving a French Richard-Brasier, won in a stirring duel over Jenatzy's Mercedes.

Thus, for 1905, the race - the final Gordon Bennett Cup - would return home to France.

The Germans may have thought they were smart by stacking the entry list in Ireland, but even they could not have anticipated the sort of preparations French firms would make for the 1905 finale.

Renault built a special, low-slung car to deal with all the curves on the carefully selected route. Darracq opted for a special lightweight car to cope with the nuances of the circuit. Meanwhile, de Dietrich went with horsepower - 130 horsepower! - for the climb up the volcanic hills of the Auvergne region.

But even the French automakers' preparations paled when compared to those by Michelin, the French rubber company that was responsible for the race being based in its hometown, Clermont-Ferrand.

Brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin had reaped a harvest of publicity in 1895 when they were the first to put pneumatic tires on a motorcar, their home-built Éclair (Lightning), which they entered in the Paris-Bordeaux race. The fledgling racers finished ninth among 40 competitors. Afterward, the brothers spread the word about driving on air by taking their car - now bearing a sign proclaiming Michelin tires to be le roi de la route (the king of the road) - on a 2500-mile tour of the French road system.

By 1905 the brothers had become so convinced of the potential of the motorcar that they convinced French auto club officials to stage the Gordon Bennett Cup event in their backyard. They even underwrote preparations for the race to the tune of 200,000 francs, and offered to lay out the 85-mile route around which the competitors would make three laps.

The route they selected, primarily on gravel roads, included particularly tire-punishing twists and turns through a region known for his volcanic hills and mineral water spas. With 300 journalists in attendance, the French spa business would benefit from the post-race publicity. So would Michelin.

Michelin developed a new "antiskid" tire, the Semelle, with a tread studded with steel rivets to enhance grip and to extend tire life.

"Ordinary tires wouldn't have lasted 20 kilometers. That's how impressive the Michelin tires are," Leon Thery said after his second consecutive Gordon Bennett Cup victory. In fact, five of the first six finishers rode on Michelin tires. One of five subheads beneath the front-page banner proclaiming Thery's victory "again" in the European edition of the New York Herald proclaimed "Race Depended More on Respective Excellence of Tires than on Any Other Single Factor."

To further support the teams competing on their tires, the Michelin brothers also created a new racing tactic - the pit stop.

To celebrate the centenary of the last Gordon Bennett Cup competition, some 150 vehicles, ranging in age from an 1898 Leon-Bollee "tandem seater" to a 1922 Amilcar CC, gather at Clermont-Ferrand for one more lap around the original, and now paved, road circuit.

About a third of the way around, the route enters the village of Laqueuille, where each car, as it passes a staging area, is surrounded by a dozen Michelin technicians. Like many of the spectators in various villages along the route, the technicians wear turn-of-the-20th-Century style costumes. Four of them carry tires. With three men at each corner of the vehicle, they simulate the first pit stop, complete with hissing sounds as though someone were actually deflating and removing each tire.

Until Michelin created the pit stop, changing a tire could be a quarter-hour or longer ordeal for racing teams. To make changing tires easier, the Michelin brothers oversaw the paving special areas along the route for the Gordon Bennett Cup race so the service team's jacks would have a solid foundation. Wheels still remained fixed to the chassis - it wasn't until 1906 and the first Grand Prix at Le Mans that Michelin created the removable rim, and it wasn't until 1908 that the company produced the truly removable wheel and thus the first spare tire -- but even in 1905 the choreographed Michelin pit stop could get a car on its way in as little as three minutes.

The day after the race in 1905, the Herald reported that Jenatzy, "with his customary skill, made an impressive start, and tore away with a rush that was positively startling. But it was only a rush. Less than three minutes from the line he was "en panne," (suffered a break down) and the minutes slipped away ere he could get going again."

And once he did, the report continues, "he punctured and ripped his tires several times."

In 2005, the Gordon Bennett Cup centenary was a celebration, not a competition. The Schlumpf, Beaulieu, Henri Malartre-Ville de Lyon and Peugeot museums all brought cars, with Lord Montagu driving the Beaulieu's 1914 Vauxhall Prince Henry and Thierry Peugeot, part of the eighth generation to run the car company that bears his family's name, in a 1901 Peugeot Type 26.

Robert Panhard drove a 1908 Panhard Biplace built by his great-grandfather, who also built the Gordon Bennett Cup winners in 1900 and 1901. Another great grandson, Edouard Michelin, drove a 1907 Brasier that the company's historical vehicle department and French restoration specialist Jean Gallabrun had just finished bringing back to life.

"We were very happy to find this car," said Michelin, calling the Brasier racer "a little sister" to the car that Thery had driven to victory 100 years earlier.

Three cars that participated in Gordon Bennett Cup races in 1903 or 1905 were still around for the centennial celebration - two Napiers and a 1903 Mercedes 60 HP.

Meanwhile, the 1902 Delaugere Type E and the 1903 Maxim 16HP that took part were the last remaining vehicles of their type in existence. The 1913 Peugeot 139A was one of two remaining and the 1913 Alba 8 HPR 4063 was one of only three such cars still in existence, organizers said.

Perhaps just as impressive, the 1907 Clement-Bayard AC4J has been housed in the same garage in France ever since it was purchased as a new car 98 years ago.

The cars - representing more than 80 marques and eight countries -- and their owners had assembled in Clermont-Ferrand by Thursday. On Friday, they drove an 80-mile route to the northeast of the city, ending at Vulcania, parc Europeen du volcanisme, which would be the departure point for the historic route on Saturday.

Villages along the route staged festivals to celebrate the old cars coming through, and crowds had gathered at seemingly every intersection in the French countryside between the towns to cheer and photograph the cars.

At one of the final stops, at Pontgibaud, Michelin unveiled a replica of the merry-go-round it had constructed more than 100 years ago to demonstrate the enhanced ride quality provided by its air-filled tires. The wooden structure carried two carts -- one with a solid tire, one with a pneumatic - around a bumpy circle so anyone could experience the difference.

After a banquet Saturday night, the cars spent Sunday making laps around Charade, the five-mile, 33-turn hilltop racetrack that four times between 1965 and 1972 was the site of the French Grand Prix, a race begun, remember, because of displeasure over the rules that governed the Gordon Bennett Cup, proving, once again, what goes around comes around, even a century later.

[Photography by Rick Dole]