French ingenuity on four wheels

PARIS — Soon after the turn of the 20th century, Marcel Leyat, like many mechanically inclined young men, decided to build a motorcar.

What emerged from Leyat’s Paris workshop in 1913 was a car like none before or since. The Helica dispensed with bourgeois features such as a chassis, a transmission and front-wheel steering. Up front, Leyat mounted a huge propeller, and the driver and passenger sat fore and aft in a canvas-covered cockpit. A chain connected to a steering wheel turned the rear wheels.

He sold two dozen.

“Leyat was an aviator,” Claude Gueniffey, an expert on the Helica, said earlier this month at Retromobile, the vast classic car exhibition in Paris. “So when he decided to build a car, he built one like a plane without wings.”

But while the Helica appears to have descended to Earth from another planet, it slots neatly into the French carmaking tradition of ignoring tradition.

The full flowering of French ingenuity was on display at Retromobile, in its 38th year at the Paris Expo center in the south of the city. Over five days, 75,000 visitors were expected to take in displays of hundreds of landmark vehicles from Les Grands Trois — Renault, Citroen and Peugeot — and giants of the golden age of motoring such as Bugatti, Talbot-Lago and Delahaye. Vendors offer Art Deco racing posters, orphaned Lalique hood ornaments and refurbished steering wheels.

Gueniffey is one of the few people who can answer this question about the Helica, of which only two survive: How’s it handle?

“It’s like driving a big ventilator,” he said, laughing. “It makes a lot of noise. It’s very strange and scary.”

It isn’t all that bad, said Jeff Lane of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, who built a replica Helica using plans that Gueniffey discovered in a vineyard building in 2004. Because the Helica is essentially powered by a stiff breeze, it takes a couple of minutes to reach 30 mph.

In contrast to Leyat’s spindly machine, my eye was drawn to a cascading 1937 Delahaye in two-tone sky blue and cream, the automotive equivalent of a perfectly coifed Afghan hound. I struck up a conversation with a polished older gentleman in double-breasted coat and pocket square, who told me that the coachwork was actually a re-creation of a Figoni et Falaschi design that was fabricated by Auto Classique Touraine.

He opened the door of a 1937 Bugatti 57 Atalante and pointed to the tobacco-colored leather interior in the sleek coupe.

“Hermes,” he said. “Alligator.”

“Patrick,” he said, introducing himself. “Patrick Delage.”

Could it be? Mais oui! Indeed he said he was the great-grandson of Louis Delage, the creator of the legendary Delage, a luxury rival to the more sporting Bugattis that was later acquired by Delahaye.

But life isn’t all chocolate and Champagne. The French have created legendary quotidian cars, too, infusing econoboxes with a little joie de vivre. While there are just a handful of space-oddity Citroen 2CVs still doddering around Paris, swarms of smooth-riding Renault 5s (known in America as Le Car) and Peugeot 205s still zip along the country’s village lanes and cobblestone streets.

Last year, the Renault 5 had its day at Retromobile, 2012 being its 40th anniversary, so this year it was the 205’s turn, the banty Peugeot celebrating 30 years.

“I call it a ‘no filter’ car, with direct feeling controls,” said Francois-Xavier Basse, the editor of Youngtimers magazine, which is devoted to the cars of 1970-90.

Although parts of Retromobile seemed a sea of French racing blue, foreign marques made a strong showing. Mercedes brought one of its record-setting 1909 Blitzen-Benzstreamliners, with a 21.5-liter engine.

The various strands of French design came together in the Citroen DS, introduced in 1955 at the Paris Salon de l’Auto, causing a sensation.

“The DS means revolution,” said Francois Melcion, the director of Retromobile. “And the French, we like revolution.”

The heart of the DS line was always the four-door sedan, but the main display at Retromobile — the private collection of the Swiss dealer Lukas Huni, and meant to mimic the 1955 debut — also included the hangarlike Safari wagon and a few of the coachbuilder Henri Chapron’s slender cabriolets, which can fetch six-figure prices at auction.