8,000 miles on brass and backbone: Why you need to read Kassia St. Clair’s 'The Race to the Future'

For readers of Hemmings Motor News who love the smell of gear oil and brass-era grit, Kassia St. Clair’s The Race to the Future: 8,000 Miles to Paris—The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century is a fantastic read. Instead of just rehashing a dry, century-old travelogue, St. Clair zeroes in on the 1907 Peking-to-Paris motor rally as the exact moment the car graduated from a rich man’s toy into a world-changing machine. She captures a pivotal moment in time, framing 1907 as one of the last years “when the automobile would be considered an experimental novelty rather than a practical form of transport.”

Mechanical grit versus untamed terrain

What makes this book such a treat for automotive enthusiasts is how it respects the sheer mechanical torture these early cars endured. The whole madness started when the French newspaper Le Matin boldly challenged the world to prove that “with an automobile one can do anything and go anywhere.” Five incredibly primitive machines actually showed up at the starting line in Peking. You had Prince Scipione Borghese in a massive, 40-horsepower Itala built like a tank, a smooth-talking con man named Charles Godard in a 15-horsepower Dutch Spyker, and a pair of rugged 10-horsepower French De Dion-Boutons. There was even a brave soul named Auguste Pons attempting the trek in a lightweight, 6-horsepower Contal three-wheeler, which was tragically swallowed by the desert sands early on.

St. Clair doesn’t skip the raw, knuckle-busting realities of driving across continents before gas stations, paved highways, or AAA existed. Fuel had to be dragged out into the wilderness ahead of time by camel and donkey caravans. When things broke, there were no spare parts catalog orders. Drivers had to rely on village blacksmiths, pure luck, and teams of local laborers pulling the cars up boulder-strewn mountains with ropes. The book pits the drivers’ “derring-do (and sometimes cheating)” against a completely unforgiving landscape as they “battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert.”

More than an adventure story

The book is a great adventure tale, but it is even better at capturing the historical backdrop. St. Clair notes that the Peking-to-Paris rally is a perfect “parable” of a world “teetering on the very edge of the most consequential century in human history.” As these guys were chugging along at 15 miles per hour, they were literally driving past the final days of the crumbling Qing dynasty and through an Imperial Russia that was only a decade away from a bloody revolution.

My favorite detail is how the organizers purposefully mapped the race to follow the electric telegraph lines. This let journalists like Luigi Barzini, who was riding shotgun in the Itala, wire frantic, live updates back to European newspapers. It became one of the world’s very first viral, live-tracked media sensations. This book is a great reminder of the exact moment the horse-drawn world started to collapse.

St. Clair puts together a “gripping, immersive narrative” that explores everything from “the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing” to how this single insane race “provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change.”

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