Talbot Lago T26C

These two cars competed in the HGPCA Pre-1952 Grand Prix Car Race at the Coys International Historic Festival meeting at Silverstone in July 1998.

Car number 4 is the 1948 Talbot Lago T26C of Tony Bianchi which has a 6-cylinder inline 4,482cc unsupercharged engine. The Talbot Lagos took part in the 1948 (pre-World Championship) Grand Prix races but were generally outnumbered and outclassed by the Ferraris and Maseratis, although Louis Rosier won the Belgian Grand Prix and Louis Chiron the French Grand Prix in one of these cars. Tony Bianchi’s Talbot-Lago T26C is chassis #110 008 which was Philippe Etancelin's car in 1949 and then passed to Jean Achard in November 1950. Achard moved to Brazil, taking the car, and sold it there to Pinheiro Pires who raced it in Brazil from 1951 to 1954. The car came to the UK via Colin Crabbe in the 1980s and then via other UK owners to Tony Bianchi in the 1990s. On the left, car number 1 is Richard Pilkington's 1950 Talbot T26 GS, one that had been adapted to also run in sports car events. It's chassis #110057, the car with which Louis Rosier and Juan Manuel Fangio competed in the 1951 Le Mans 24 Hour race, but retired in the 9th hour after completing 92 laps. It was then given an all-enveloping sports car body and ended up in the hands of Georges Grignard in 1953, but after an accident at Montlhéry in 1954 in which his co-driver Guy Mairesse was killed, Grignard locked the wrecked car away in his garage. Richard Pilkington bought the wreckage in 1958 and after racing the car in its sports car form for some years he eventually restored it to its original cycle-wing body form, racing it at historic race meetings in both sports car and vintage GP races.