1,000 Greatest Drivers: Léon Théry

The Michelin man who named the Michelin Man. (Well, probably not.)

Well, my first LearnedLeague round since 2016 just ended last night and I managed to just barely not get demoted from Rundle D to the lowest level Rundle E. I was below the cutline for elimination for most of the round before creeping out of it in the final week, when I got a lot more questions right. I guess the bar trivia and the online trivia were feeding into each other and I can think of one very specific example when they did. I improved from 51/150 correct answers last time to 59 this time. If the competition was determined solely by the number of correct answers, I still would have been relegated, but LearnedLeague also uses a system where each player assigns a certain number of points: 0 for one of each day’s six questions, 1 for two of them, 2 for two of them, and 3 for one question based on the relative likelihood that you think your opponent will get the question. Although I only ranked 21st overall, I ranked 9th on defensive efficiency, which measures how successful you were at defense and identifying what questions your opponents found easier or more difficult, and I think that’s why I survived. It reminds me very much of tournament Scrabble honestly, where my math nerd brain made me a good strategist and allowed me to cover up my weaknesses due to lack of study.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I wanted to do LearnedLeague was because I thought it might be good content here, so I’m going to go through all the answers here and write down what I put for the answers I got incorrect. All players’ usernames are based on their last name and first initial, so I will always be listed as “WronaS”.

Got the first question even though I never really watched tennis because I read many of the ‘80s and ‘90s World Almanacs profusely before everything went online. My opponent really thought I was going to get Three’s Company wrong, failing to realize ‘70s-’90s sitcoms are my greatest television knowledge base. While that show isn’t particularly to my taste, I’ve watched either all of or a lot of the classic ‘70s sitcoms: All in the Family, Barney Miller, Fawlty Towers, Taxi, and WKRP in Cincinnati (which remains my favorite TV show of all time). My issues in TV knowledge generally come down to like prestige dramas and things from this century, particularly series that were only available on streaming and never on broadcast television since I could rarely justify spending money on streaming platforms, although I’m starting to get into that now. Don’t think I ever read any of the Bronte books, but that was obvious ‘cause I knew there were three sisters. Answered cuneiform for #5 even though I correctly thought that was way older. Answered orca whale for #6. I never realized how much I struggled with animals until recently, which is one of my weak spots that I didn’t think was a weak spot. I think I considered blue whale though.

Did not put anything down for the last three questions. I did pick up later that you should at least attempt to answer every question, because sometimes your random guesses will be right, and that may be why my percentage of correct answers went up late in the round. Had never heard of Tate or petrichor, so I wouldn’t have gotten those. I have heard of the CN Tower vaguely and if I’d thought of abbreviating that, maybe I’d have gotten it. I did consider Ireland and Sinn Fein for the first quesstion and might have even put it down, but switched to Ukraine. I’m shocked that only 54% of people in the league got R.E.M. right. I know they’ve weirdly fallen into obscurity compared to a lot of other early alternative bands, but that seemed even easier than “Never Gonna Give You Up” to me, maybe because I personally don’t like memes or because I grew up on classic rock radio. I still made the correct choice regarding which question to rate as easier though.

Brazil was just a guess; I didn’t actually know that. Sousaphone you just have to think it out. Never read Things Fall Apart either but it still just instantly came to me. What with my eating disorder and the fact that I’ve eaten probably fewer than like 30 things for the past 30 years, my food knowledge is abysmal and I am almost guaranteed to miss every single question. It might have helped if I knew what a trago was, but I did not and put Gabriel García Márquez, I guess thinking that was a literary reference. The math questions they ask are generally quite ridiculous compared to the other categories and much harder. I realize I was great at mental calculation but only mediocre at actual theoretical math (which is an entirely different skill), but still, it feels like you have to have more collegiate math than even I have to have even heard of the answers to most of these questions, which I can’t say for most of the other categories. I’d never heard of the Millennium Prize and didn’t even realize it was a math question, putting down Nobel Prize in Physics. And then the last question. Like I said, my knowledge of streaming television is shit and also if you are not a kid and do not have kids, your knowledge of current kids’ cartoons will probably be pretty sparse. I put Bluey and that was the most common wrong answer at least.

I’ve heard of a lot of movies I’ve never seen just because I’ve read a lot of film criticism and that has reaped dividends a lot; it ended up being one of my strongest categories even though I don’t consider myself a film buff at all. Had no idea on the rest, even yeti, which to most people was completely obvious (84% of people got it, and this was just a weird blindspot for me; I obviously didn’t even realize this was an easy question). I put Cape Town, Frank Sinatra, Sirens, Niels Bohr, and most embarrassingly, avalanche.

I forgot to save my answers to this one, even though I did for all the other days. I think I put Zelig for #3 and that was a really good guess: the Woody Allen movie that Forrest Gump largely ripped off. I knew it was around that time. I had just memorized all the world capitals around this time although I think I’ve already forgotten a bunch since, but question #4 didn’t say it was a capital, so I just put Eritrea because I knew it was adjacent to Ethiopia. I knew Eritrea wasn’t also a capital, but I thought it could still be a city within Eritrea (it isn’t). Didn’t know where Djibouti was located. Don’t remember what I put for #2. I think Chick-fil-A was what I wanted to put for question #6 but I forgot the name of that hellhole and I think I left that blank as a result.

Anyway, this was kind of fun and I think I’m going to review my answers for each of the remaining four weeks over the next four days.

LÉON THÉRY…………………….FRANCE

Born: April 16, 1879
Died: March 8, 1909

Best year: 1904
Best drive: 1904 Gordon Bennett Cup in Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

A motorsports pioneer generally recognized as the first to introduce analytical thinking to the sport, Théry was a forerunner to later drivers like Alain Prost in developing the eventually-cliched strategy “to finish first, one must first finish”. His mechanical engineering background inspired him to keep detailed logs of surface conditions and the performance of his car, engine, and tires, using these data to calculate an optimal speed for each race, which he strove to never deviate from, garnering the nickname “Le Chronometer” as a result. In so doing, he was years if not decades ahead of his time.

Théry started racing voiturettes (miniature cars) for Decauville, which was primarily a locomotive manufacturer Decauville. In his first major race, the 1898 Paris-Amsterdam-Paris Race, he was frequently credited with giving the Michelin Man its name, Bibendum. According to legend, Théry shouted either “Here comes Bibendum!” or “Long live Bibendum!” as the tire manufacturer’s co-founder André Michelin approached. This could be apocryphal as other sources claim Michelin got the name from a cartoon, which seems more plausible.

Théry had few major successes until joining the upstart Richard-Brasier car company. From 1900-1905, the Gordon Bennett Cup was Europe’s most prestigious race. Financed by the eponymous New York Herald magnate James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the race pitted national automobile clubs against each other. All cars were required to be constructed entirely in the country of origin, and the winning country won a Panhard racing car sculpture and the right to host the following year’s race. Théry was the race’s only two-time winner, winning in 1904 and 1905 in Germany and France respectively before the Cup was replaced by the French Grand Prix in 1906. He also won both elimination races, making him the only two-time winner both years. The 1905 race was held near Michelin’s headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand and Michelin drivers swept the first four positions. After the race, Théry and Richard-Brasier owner Charles-Henri Brasier were hailed as national heroes on the Paris streets. Théry subsequently stopped driving and attempted to start his own car company, but it was a disastrous failure. He made one final start at the 1908 French GP where he retired on the last lap before dying of tuberculosis.

Although Théry popularized a racing style that I seldom admire because I think drivers have far less input in their cars’ reliability than most others seem to, I am impressed by his avant garde engineering breakthroughs and there’s no arguing against the success and influence he had in his heyday. While I usually downgrade drivers from the first decade of motorsports history due to a lack of competition, I make an exception here since he came of age just as motorsports was really becoming important internationally, what with the first Vanderbilt Cup race in 1904, the first IndyCar season in 1905, and the first French GP in 1906. As a result, I award significantly more seasonal points starting in 1905, and his second-place ranking that year easily qualifies him for the list.

Year-by-year: 1900: 5, 1904: 2, 1905: 2