For all the importance the event undoubtedly had at the time, surely nobody involved in the 1906 French Grand Prix expended much effort predicting that another race of the same name would be run a century later. Yet that inaugural competition was the true starting point from which evolved the globally popular sport of Formula 1.


In 1906, motorsport was a young phenomenon but by no means a brand new one. The biggest races up until then had been the city-to-city affairs (which were eventually banned as the loss of life soared beyond acceptable levels) and the annual Gordon Bennett Cup races.


A feature of the Gordon Bennett events was that no more than three cars manufactured in a single country could be entered. This was simply a case of giving nations other than France a sporting chance. The French, dominant in the industry at the time, could have produced an entire race entry all by themselves, and they objected to this rule rather strongly.

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At one point they got round it by inviting companies in other countries to manufacture replicas of their cars - hence the brief but spectacular existence of the Glasgow-built Weir-Darracqs, for example - but the eventual answer was to create their own race. That race was the 1906 Grand Prix, for which the rules allowed any country to enter as many cars as it liked.


And it was a French car that won, though not with a French driver on board. The car was a Renault, and it was handled by a Hungarian known in his adopted country of France as François Szisz, though his first name was really Ferenc and he was (and still is) referred to in Hungary as Szisz Ferenc.


His great rival in 1906 was the handsome, dashing Italian Felice Nazarro, who drove for Fiat. In many ways the first Grand Prix foreshadowed the ones being run nowadays; Szisz and Nazarro were the stars, but the manufacturers were out for all the publicity they could get, and their ability to produce fast and reliable machines went a long way to determining whether the Hungarian or the Italian would finish first.


If power were the only thing that mattered, Fiat would have had the upper hand. A century ago, almost none of what we now consider normal methods of tuning engines had been discovered, and the most obvious way to build a powerful engine was to make it larger than a less powerful one.


To modern eyes, the Renault unit was a monster at 13 litres, but it wasn't unduly hefty for 1906, and the Fiat was more substantial still. And stronger, too - estimates of the Renault's output range from 95 to 105bhp, that of the Fiat from 110 to 136bhp.


The Renault, however, was more radical, though not as radical as another car built by the same company for the 1905 season. The most amazing feature of this earlier model was how close to the ground it ran; its low centre of gravity should have made it impressively nimble than the much taller opposition, and according to contemporary reports it handled very impressively. But for some reason Renault abandoned the idea, and nobody else took it up until the 1920s.


All the same, Renault's first Grand Prix car was a technical marvel. For a start, it was the first racer to use hydraulic dampers. And following an already established Renault tradition, but unlike all its rivals, it had its massive, heavy radiator mounted behind the engine, so that even if the centre of gravity's height was of no concern, the value of having it as close to the middle of the car as possible was at least being exploited.


The design of the radiator was quite something too. It worked on the thermo-syphon principle, whereby hot water in the engine rose to the top, entered the radiator, fell as it cooled, and returned to the bottom of the engine. The flow was so effective that the weight and complication of a water pump could be ignored.


So the two leading contenders in the race were a powerful car and an uncommonly clever one, each with a superb driver at the wheel. Along with all the rest, they competed on a course laid out at Le Mans - not the one used nowadays for the 24-hour race, but a very fast and roughly triangular 64-mile layout on roads which are still part of France's highway network. The whole event took a weekend, six laps having to be completed on the Saturday and another six on the Sunday.


Few Grand Prix races can ever have taken so much out of those taking part. Temperatures were colossal on both days, and the road surface was so awful that the drivers (and their riding mechanics) were constantly having to stop and replace punctured tyres. In this respect Szisz was helped by the Renault's weight balance, which put less stress on its Michelin rubber.


But his skill as a driver was also crucial. Consistent, fast and sympathetic to his machinery, Szisz won the race by thirty minutes from Nazarro (after twelve hours of competitive driving!) and earned himself a place in history. For Nazarro there was to be compensation a year later; the second French Grand Prix ran to a fuel consumption formula, and Szisz was too cautious. Nazarro was quicker, but the fuel tank of the 1907 Renault was found to have a lot more juice in it than the Fiat's did. If Szisz had been less nervous of running dry, perhaps Hungary could have claimed the winner of the first two Grands Prix as its own.


In fact, once Szisz had retired, there was no Hungarian Grand Prix driver at all until the turn of the next century, when Zsolt Baumgartner briefly reached the top level. And although Fiat became an increasingly successful and innovative race car manufacturer for many years after 1906, Renault quickly faded from the scene. It wasn't until the 1970s that the company returned to GPs, and it was as adventurous then as it had been seven decades earlier.


Having got the business of winning the Le Mans 24-hour race out of the way, Renault became the first F1 team to go for the legal but widely-ignored option of running a 1.5-litre turbocharged engine (having previously toyed with the idea of creating a nine-cylinder naturally-aspirated three-litre from one and a half V6 Formula 2 engines). The first Renault turbo win was achieved by Jean-Pierre Jabouille in 1979 - at the French Grand Prix again - and a new chapter in F1 history began.


The sport has moved on in the intervening 27 years, of course, and it's all but unrecognisable from the way it was back in 1906. But not quite. This article is being published on the weekend of the 2006 French Grand Prix. That race comes roughly halfway through a season when most of the public attention has been focussed on Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher.


To say that these two are the Szisz and Nazarro of their day might be stretching things slightly, but one drives for Renault and the other drives for Ferrari, which has for many years been part of the Fiat Group. The symmetry adds a nice touch to the end of Grand Prix racing's first century.


Source: CARkeys


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