1,000 Greatest Drivers: René Thomas/Gaston Chevrolet

The French connection.

I’m going to catch up with my intended schedule of 21 Indy 500 winners in 21 days by doing both René Thomas and Gaston Chevrolet today and both Billy Arnold and Bill Cummings tomorrow. I wasn’t able to quite come up with 500 words for Thomas and I imagine there are going to be a few more pioneering drivers like that who I’ll be just short on, but I wasn’t going to pad it. The book is probably going to be over 900 pages long as it is. Writing about these drivers together makes sense since Thomas reflected the ultimate zenith of the European dominance at the Indy 500 in the 1910s even though he was neither as good nor as interesting as Jules Goux was, while Chevrolet although born in France, marked the return of American dominance over IndyCar racing by beating Thomas for the win in 1920.

Well, some big stuff’s happening in my real life as it looks like the guy at Onondaga County Community Development has finally found a contractor to install a ramp and repair the roof so hopefully Mom will be able to come home soon. I just need to get it notarized and signed, and I figure that will take another couple weeks of phone tag before the construction will begin. Also, it looks like I’ve finally found someone to extricate our car, which hasn’t been running for six years, from the garage so I can donate it to Habitat for Humanity as planned. The main reason I want to do this is so I can move a lot of things sitting on the floor in other rooms into the garage both so I can create more space for Mom to navigate if/when she comes home and also so I can finally have a deep clean done after my mom’s hoarding. Looks good on both of those.

RENÉ THOMAS………………….FRANCE

Born: March 7, 1886
Died: September 23, 1975

Best year: 1914
Best drive: 1914 Indianapolis 500

In the wake of Jules Goux’s dominant Indy 500 win in 1913, a cavalcade of Europeans invaded the Indianapolis Motor Speedway thirsting for glory the next year. Thomas became the second straight Frenchman to win the Indy 500 as a rookie. A pioneer in both motorsports and aviation, he was involved in the world’s first mid-air collision when Thomas’s Antoinette monoplane fell onto Bertram Dickson’s Farman biplane in 1910. Miraculously, both pilots survived but Dickson never entirely recovered from his injuries and died three years later. After starting out racing motorcycles, Thomas switched to cars in 1906, primarily racing Delages. He won Delage’s first race at the Course de Dieppe in 1908 and his teammates Albert Guyot and Paul Bablot would also occasionally win races across Europe. However, Thomas’s first major win came in a Lion-Peugeot at the 1200 kilometer Coupe d’Ostende Formula Libre race in Belgium in 1912.

In 1914, Thomas reunited with Delage in an Indy 500 dominated by French cars and European drivers. Georges Boillot set the fastest qualifying time, but a different Frenchman Jean Chassagne started first since the grid was determined by a random draw. The race proved to be a battle between the Delages of Thomas and Guyot and the Peugeots of Belgian Arthur Duray, Goux, and Boillot. Boillot suffered a broken frame and failed to finish, but the other Europeans swept the top four with Thomas leading Duray, Guyot, and Goux in a 1-4 finish for French cars, beating Duray by over six minutes and Goux, the defending champion, by thirteen.

While that was the pinnacle of Thomas’s career, he did return to Indy three more times, becoming the first polesitter to average 100 mph in 1919 and finishing second in 1920. He also led the Targa Florio for its first three laps in 1919 before losing the lead to Georges’s brother André Boillot after pitting and crashing on the final lap in a failed attempt to catch him, earned a major voiturette win in Le Mans in 1921 and became the first Indy 500 winner to set the world land speed record in 1924 at 143.31 mph, although Ernest Eldridge broke his record six days later.

Thomas couldn’t have been less like Goux as while Goux was brash, bombastic, and flamboyant, Thomas was more mild-mannered, more interested in checking the condition of the car after the race than playing a media persona, which actually garnered him some mild criticism from the Indianapolis Star, although according to observers in his pit, he did say “damn” after the race. As a result, he fell into obscurity relative to even most of the other early Indy 500 winners. The reign of French dominance over the Speedway did not last long, as the devastation that ravaged Europe during World War I decimated European industry and the balance of power at Indianapolis would switch back to the United States for the next 50 years.

Year-by-year: 1908: C+, 1912: E, 1914: 2, 1919: E, 1920: E-, 1921: E, 1924: E

GASTON CHEVROLET……………….USA

Born: October 26, 1892
Died: November 25, 1920

Best year: 1919
Best drive: 1920 Indianapolis 500

The younger brother of drivers and eponymous car company co-founders Louis and Arthur, Gaston was not involved with the company but eventually followed his brothers into the cockpit and won the 1920 Indy 500 and season championship. The Chevrolet brothers were ethnically Swiss and Louis and Arthur were born in Switzerland, but the family moved to France before Gaston’s birth. Louis emigrated to the United States in 1901 to work for the French manufacturer de Dion-Bouton and raised enough money to bring his brothers along shortly thereafter. Although Gaston died before obtaining his American citizenship, he always identified as American.

Louis had already sold his shares of Chevrolet to General Motors founder William Durant in 1914 before Gaston’s career began, but the Chevrolet brothers started another car company, Frontenac, in 1916 and this time Gaston was heavily involved. After failing to qualify for the 1916 Indy 500, he emerged as a rising talent during World War I, earning podiums in his first three starts in 1917 for his family’s team. After receiving a one-year ban from the AAA for entering an unsanctioned race, Gaston sporadically entered races in 1919, winning three consecutive races on wooden board tracks at Sheepshead Bay, New York and Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

1920 was the first season when the IndyCar championship started to be held regularly. Chevrolet won at Indianapolis after Ralph DePalma’s car caught fire then stalled in the pits, becoming the first Indy 500 winner to not changing tires. Since all five 1920 races were won by different drivers and the Indy 500 awarded substantially more points, he won the championship despite dying in a crash at the Beverly Hills finale. Chevrolet and Eddie O’Donnell were trying to simultaneously lap Joe Thomas when they collided. O’Donnell’s car flipped while Chevrolet’s car rode the guardrail for 20 feet and took out considerable fencing before landing atop the wreckage underneath which O’Donnell and his riding mechanic Lyall Jolls were pinned. O’Donnell and Jolls were also killed, but Chevrolet’s riding mechanic survived and the race actually continued. Gallingly, AAA officials retroactively decided to count some of the non-championship races towards the 1920 championship years later, handing Tommy Milton the “championship”. IndyCar’s Astor Cup erroneously lists Milton as the champion to this day.

Chevrolet’s brief career marked a perfect turning point between the era of French dominance in the 1910s and the era of American dominance in the 1920s. Although born in France, his Indy 500 win for Frontenac was the first for an American car since 1912. While I don’t think Chevrolet would have ultimately rivaled Milton and Jimmy Murphy, the two dominant drivers of the 1920s and indeed, I ranked both of them higher in 1920, it’s kind of disgusting that IndyCar took away a title from the first posthumous champion and the first Indy 500 winner who died as the defending champion. The Chevrolet name lives on as one of the world’s most storied car companies even if the brothers bearing that name are sadly overlooked.

Year-by-year: 1919: 2, 1920: 3