Beschreibung:

1920/21 PEUGEOT 3 LITRE INDIANAPOLIS RACING TWO-SEATER Engine No. 3 Dark blue with maroon leather interior Engine: four cylinder monobloc with twin overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder, dry sump, bore & stroke 80mm x 148mm, 2975cc.; Gearbox: four speed and reverse with right-hand change; Suspension: half-elliptic springs with friction shock absorbers front and rear; Brakes: external handbrake to rear wheels and footbrake to front wheels. Right hand drive. Before the First World War it can reasonably be argued that the ancient French firm of Peugeot was more successful in motor racing than any other manufacturer. The other great firms of the era such as Panhard, Levassor, Mors, Renault, Fiat and Mercedes had their periods of success, or sensational triumphs, but none of these makers were there from the dawn of motor racing in 1894 and also there at the end for the 1914 French Grand Prix in the way that Peugeot was. In the Paris-Rouen trial of 1894 a Peugeot shared the first prize, and although Georges Boillot's Peugeot did not win the French Grand Prix at Lyon in 1914, driver and car presented the victorious Mercedes of Lautenschlager with an outstanding competition in one of the great motor races of all time. In between these two events, Peugeot had won the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris Race (Levassor completed the course first and won the acclaim, but his car did not meet the regulations) and there were numerous other successes, not least the French Grand Prix wins for Peugeot in 1912 and 1913 and first place in the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race in the latter year, together with many first prizes in voiturette races and in numerous other competitions. The fact that examples of the 1914 Grand Prix Peugeots went on to win the 1915 Vanderbilt Cup race and finished first at Indianapolis in 1916, as well as being successful in many other American events, further distinguished the Peugeot as a truly exceptional automotive design. Peugeot's racing achievements from 1912 onwards were largely due to the development of twin overhead camshaft engines for their competition cars. Peugeot were not the first to make such an engine, but they were the first to fully exploit its potential for maximum power output from a given engine size. Much has been written about the genesis of the twin overhead camshaft (tohc) engine, but for Peugeot it was probably a team effort with their trio of talented racing drivers: Georges Boillot, Paulo Zuccarelli and Jules Goux together with draftsman-designer Ernest Henry and factory engineer Vasselot each making a contribution. Whatever the individual input, the result was a successful engine that spawned so many outstanding followers including Delage, Alfa Romeo and Sunbeam, and soon afterwards, Miller, Duesenberg, and Aston Martin. Indeed to this day there have been few successful racing engines that have been other than tohc units. Thus an enormous debt in the sphere of motor racing is owed to the Peugeot company for its pioneering work. After the Great War motor racing spluttered back into action and a notable achievement for Peugeot was the winning of the 1919 Targa Florio by Andr Boillot (brother of Georges) at the wheel of a 2-litre tohc car that had been built for the 1914 Coupe de l'Auto that the outbreak of the war had prevented from taking place. Encouraged by this result and a win in the same year by Howard 'Howdy' Wilcox at Indianapolis in one of the old 1914 Lyon Grand Prix cars, for the 500 race of 1920, Peugeot commissioned their designer Marcel Grmillon to develop a car to meet the new 3-litre (183ci.) racing formula. Inspired by the pre-war twin-cam engines, Grmillon took what seemed to be a logical step forward and designed engines with three overhead camshafts, five valves per cylinder and twin ignition from two separate magnetos. These four-cylinder engines were installed in new chassis that were upswept over the front axle, thus reducing the ground clearance compared with the 1914 cars