1926 Avion Voisin C4 Roadster

1926 Avion Voisin C4 Roadster

Gabriel Voisin was perhaps France’s greatest aviation pioneer. In 1907 he built the first practical aeroplane capable of leaving the ground under its own power, and his Avions Voisin company was the first mass producer of aircraft in the world. But the end of WWI in 1918 brought a halt to Voisin’s aviation ventures and forced him to look elsewhere to provide employment for his workforce.

After experimenting with motorised bicycles and a light two-seater economy car, Voisin decided to produce an automobile that would be unrivalled for prestige, comfort and speed. The resulting Knight sleeve valve-engined 4.0-litre Voisin M1 appeared in 1919. It was one of the first truly modern cars to be delivered after the Armistice and in 1920 was re-designated ‘C1’ in honour of Gabriel Voisin’s dead brother Charles, though the mechanical specification remained the same. A special version took part in speed trails and hill climbs to demonstrate the speed and economy of the Voisin chassis, and in 1921 a C1 chassis taken straight off the production line and fitted with a skimpy aluminium body, beat the legendary Blue Train from Paris to Nice by six hours. Voisin kept faith with the sleeve valve engine, developing the design himself and extending it to the smaller models in the range. The first of these small Voisins was the 1,250cc 8CV C4 of 1921, which was later enlarged to 1.5 litres and 10CV. Although the C4 had only three speeds in the gearbox, this was more than compensated for by the sleeve valve engine’s torque and the fact that lightweight coachwork was another of Voisin’s obsessions.

A rare survivor of a marque that created some of the most original cars of all time, thanks to Gabriel Voisin’s genius, this Voisin C4 was purchased in the mid-1960s from its owner in France, Jean-Pierre Nicholas, of Toulouse by H C Stork, a resident of Enschede in the Netherlands. The car comes with a substantial file of history containing much correspondence dating from this period together with an original Swiss Permis de Circulation dating from the 1950s. The latter records the car as having 4/5-seater limousine coachwork at that time, and there are period photographs on file depicting it with this body. The Voisin later found its way into Peter Kaus’ famous Rosso Bianco Collection, and there is correspondence on file (dated 1987) from Kraftfahrzeuge Schmitt, which states that the body currently fitted was commissioned in Belgium in the mid-1970s by a Mr ‘Mahie’ (presumably the collector Ghislain Mahy). This letter also records that the engine, transmission, chassis and axles were overhauled at the same time, and that the car performed well at speeds up to 90km/h (56mph).

Descriptions & pictures by bonhams & flickr