The genius of Ernest Henry
When Ernest Henry of Geneva died in Paris on 9 December 1950 at the age of 65, he had nothing left – except a lot of debt. The Swiss engineer’s career had stalled long before the Second World War, and for decades only insiders knew his name. It was only when the vehicle shown here (chassis number #1006) was presented at the Rétromobile in Paris in 2019, together with a two-volume book about the Ballot brand, that his name came back into the spotlight. As a young engineer, Henry had worked in Geneva for a company that built engines for ships, motorcycles and cars. When Charles Picker, his boss at the time, moved to Paris, Henry followed him – and soon received an order from Hispano-Suiza to design small-volume racing engines. These were so successful that Peugeot also bought some of Henry’s engines – and hired the designer as well. Ernest Henry subsequently designed a 7.6-litre four-cylinder engine for Peugeot, which was the first to combine two overhead camshafts, four valves per cylinder and hemispherical combustion chambers. With this 175 hp machine, Peugeot won the French Grand Prix in 1912 and, a year later (as well as in 1916 and 1919), the Indianapolis 500. (There is also a nice story to tell about ‘les charlatans’, a little secret operation by Robert Peugeot, the two drivers Jules Goux and Georges Boillot, the designer Paolo Zuccarelli and, of course, Ernest Henry.)
After the First World War, Frenchman René Thomas convinced his compatriot Ernest-Maurice Ballot to build him a racing car for the 1920 Indy 500. Établissements Ballot had been building engines since 1905, and the Ballot brothers had made a fortune during the war. The small company hired the then famous Ernest Henry to design a racing car for them – and the Swiss engineer designed a 5-litre V8 with all the ingredients that had made his Peugeot engine so successful. A few months before the race, the regulations were changed again, with only three litres of displacement now permitted, so Henry had to go back to his design office and develop a new engine. And while he was at it, he optimised the entire vehicle, including adjusting the aerodynamics. Three of these Ballot 3/8 LC cars then competed at Indianapolis, with Ralph DePalma, Jean Chassagne and, of course, René Thomas. DePalma took pole position and easily dominated the entire race, but 35 miles before the finish line, he had a problem with the fuel supply and fell back to 5th place, directly behind Thomas. DePalma took 2nd place at the 1921 French Grand Prix, and Jules Goux finally achieved the big win at the Italian Grand Prix – with an average speed of 144 km/h, which was very impressive at the time.
Ernest Henry moved on to Darraq and later founded a small company that manufactured aluminium pistons, but was cheated out of his entire investment by his business partners and lost all his money. But there was more trouble to come: Hispano-Suiza sued Peugeot, claiming that the famous 7.6-litre engine was actually designed by Marc Birkigt, with Henry merely acting as a draughtsman and ‘stealing’ the entire design. At the time, the court ruled in Birkigt’s favour; today we know that this was wrong and that the credit actually belongs to Henry. Ballot himself went on to build several more road cars – and, in an ironic twist of fate, was swallowed up by Hispano-Suiza in 1932.
A total of four of these Ballot 3/8 LC cars were probably built. As already mentioned, the vehicle shown here is chassis number #1006. Intensive research revealed that it was this vehicle that finished 7th in the 1920 Indy 500 with Chassange, retired while leading the 1921 French Grand Prix with Chassange, won the Italian Grand Prix with Goux in the same year, and finished 3rd in the 1922 Indy with Eddie Hearn. But that’s not the end of the story: in 1923, the famous English racing driver Malcolm Campbell bought the Ballot, sold it to ‘Bentley Boy’ Jack Dunfee in 1927, and in 1933 the car went to Australia, where Michael Crowley-Milling bought it in 1940. #1006 remained in the family for 74 years, then made a few detours before coming into the right hands in 2016, who commissioned a magnificent restoration (and the aforementioned book). Gooding Christie’s is now auctioning Ernest Henry’s masterpiece at Rétromobile 2026, with an expected price of between 3.5 and 6 million euros.
More wonderful stories can be found in the archive.
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