‘PHI-PHI’: FROM WOOL TO GRAND PRIX WINNER
Few Gallic aces were as popular as the charismatic privateer Philippe Étancelin from Rouen. Born in 1896 into a wealthy family of wool merchants, Étancelin was keen to be a boxer but a serious liver illness put a stop to his training in the ring.
Story has it that his parents were very negative about motorsport, but after a trip to Paris to buy a wedding ring with his savings from collecting goose and duck feathers from local farms he came home with a Bugatti Type 35 and started hillclimbing. His debut GP wasn’t planned, either. On a business trip to Reims, with his partner Suzanne squeezed in beside him, he stopped to investigate the local Grand Prix de La Marne. Amazingly he talked a reluctant Toto Roche, the organiser, into letting him enter and ended up winning his first major competition.
Wearing his distinctive Bériot-style tweed cap back to front and Mica goggles, his press-on style and energetic sawing at the steering wheel were mocked by contemporaries, but, despite a self-confessed total lack of mechanical knowledge, Étancelin started to chalk up impressive results first with the Bugatti, and then a succession of Alfa Romeo Monzas. Always a true sportsman, there was only one way to win for Étancelin and that was from the front. When beaten by Campari in the 1934 French Grand Prix, friends advised him to protest after the Italian had clearly broken the rules with three push starters. Étancelin shrugged his shoulders, insisting “that kind of victory doesn’t interest me”.
Fast on street circuits, he impressed at Monaco in 1935 when in an elderly Maserati he caught and passed Rudi Caracciola’s Mercedes W25 for second. He dropped back to fourth after cooking his brakes. Mercedes invited him to test for the Silver Arrows squad, but he preferred instead to be his own boss.
Étancelin never enjoyed Le Mans, favouring the “cut and thrust of formula racing”, but at his first attempt, teamed with Luigi Chinetti, he won the 1934 race with a blue Alfa Romeo 8C.
He had several shunts in his career, the most dramatic coming at Monza in the 1935 Italian Grand Prix when the throttle of his new Maserati V8R1 jammed open. Skidding into a low stone wall at the Lesmo Chicane, the car somersaulted into a tree. The surgeon advised him to retire from racing, but he was back on the winner’s rostrum at Pau the following spring.
Frustrated by the dominance of the German manufacturers, Étancelin briefly retired in the late 1930s but after WW2 he was back in an elderly Monza in the 1945 Coupe des Prisonniers in the Bois de Boulogne. He later found his form again with the beefy Grand Prix Talbot-lago, scoring several top placings in the 1949 season including a win at Montlhéry in the Paris Grand Prix. Much to the frustration of organisers, the Rouennaise insisted on wearing his signature reversed cap late into his career. It’s now on display in the town’s museum. Only in his last few races did he reluctantly wear a bizarre leather bicycle racing helmet.
A much-loved character, Étancelin eventually retired in 1954 after four decades’ racing but remained involved with motorsport as a key figure in the Anciens Pilotes group. A regular at veteran reunions, he died aged 84 in Paris.
Spectacular to watch, fearless in the chase, but a gentleman after the finish who won and lost with true dignity, this noncomformist was one of France’s greatest racers.