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1919 Ballot Type 5/8LC Racing Car

After the First World War, Parisian Edouard Ballot, a manufacturer of automotive and stationary gasoline engines, decided to enhance his firm’s reputation by entering the spot of auto racing.

Engines of his own make were totally unsuited to the high speed demands of racing. Hence, Ballot hired the brilliant Swiss automotive engineer Ernest Henry, who had designed the first truly modern, high-revolution engines for the prewar Peugeot grand prix racers. It is said that Ballot announced his decision to go into racing on Christmas Eve 1918 and instructed Henry to have a team of four cars ready for the Indianapolis 500-mile race the following May.

Henry designed the new Ballot cars around a large new engine of just under five liters. Like the Peugeot, it featured double overhead camshafts, inclined overhead valves and twin carburetors. Unlike the four-cylinder Peugeots, however, the Ballot Indianapolis cars are straight eights developing about 130 horsepower.

Remarkably, Henry completed construction of the four cars in late April of 1919, and they were shipped to America. In his haste to compete, however, Ballot failed to provide his cars with complete spare parts—an oversight that was to doom the marque’s chances at Indianapolis.

Assigned to drive the Ballots were four of the finest racing drivers in France—Albert Guyot, Paul Bablot, Louis Wagner and the great René Thomas. When time trials opened for the 1919 running of the Indianapolis 500, the Ballots were clearly the fastest cars on track. Thomas set a new lap record of 104.7 miles per hour, some five miles per hour faster than the old mark.

However, the Ballots’ gearing proven unsuited to the long race around the 2 1/2 –mile oval at Indianapolis. And since the team did not bring extra rear axles with alternate gear ratios, it was forced to fit their cars with smaller American-made wheels—on which the Ballots were never designed to run. And, although they were very fast, the cars didn’t run as well as expected at Indianapolis. The best finisher among the Ballot drivers was Guyot, who brought his car home in fourth place.

The Ballot firm went on to achieve racing success in later years with smaller cars—notably in the Italian Grand Prix near Brescia in 1921. After a close but unsuccessful try in the Targa Florio race in November 1919 the 4.9-liter cars were relegated to competing in hill-climbing events.

Ballot continued to build sports and touring cars throughout the 1920s, but the firm went out of existence in the early 1930s.
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Viewed: Apr 28, 2024
Updated: Apr 10, 2024
Priced: Apr 10, 2024
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