Car Show Classic: 1924 Lorraine-Dietrich B3-6 Saloon by Million-Guiet – Enter Your Second Century In Style

I caught this lovely Lorraine-Dietrich last year, when it was still in the two-digit realm (age-wise), but what’s a year and change when you’re that old? It was more than appropriate to hold off and wait until we could celebrate its 100^th birthday with an apparition on CC – the first by this ancient and respected French marque, to boot.

There is an asterisk, though: the one celebrating its centenary is the chassis, not the body. I’m 99% sure that this car was rebodied sometime in the early to mid-‘30s, which was a fairly common operation and adds a touch of mystery to the whole deal. But let’s proceed in order and look into the Lorraine-Dietrich marque first.

The roots of Lorraine-Dietrich go very deep. The De Dietrich family’s involvement in metalwork goes back to the 1620s, when they opened their first forge in the duchy of Lorraine, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. By the 1860s, the now French company ventured into railcar manufacturing, opening a dedicated factory in Lunéville. A lot of the sprawling De Dietrich works ended up in Germany after the Franco-Prussian War and that part of the conglomerate diversified into all manner of metal-based manufacturing, including cookware, distillers, trams, bathtubs, boilers and stoves. But the Lunéville works stayed on the French side. When the dawn of the automobile age rose, the firm took that on as well, starting production in 1896 with a licensed Amédée Bollée design. Soon, they were making their own from scratch, employing future carmakers such as Emile Mathis and Ettore Bugatti in the process.

In 1905, the marque changed its name to Lorraine-Dietrich, perhaps to emphasize the firm’s French nationality and attenuate its Germanic-sounding moniker. To further clarify things, the emblem chosen for the French side of the business was the Croix de Lorraine, whereas the German side kept the hunting horn symbol used by De Dietrich since the 18^th Century (and that remains on its present-day products). After 1918, the two halves of the company were not reunited as such, though the De Dietrich family was involved in both. The car branch, along with a flourishing aero engine branch, had migrated to the Parisian suburbs by this point; the Lunéville factory remained focused on rolling stock.

The French automobile landscape of a hundred years ago was a jungle of small, medium-sized and large carmakers – we’re talking close to 90 different companies for MY 1924. The top end of the market, where Lorraine-Dietrich was positioned, was extremely cutthroat. There were literally dozens of larger (i.e. over 3-litre) chassis available, including by major makers like Berliet, Chenard & Walcker, De Dion-Bouton, Delage, Delahaye, Hispano-Suiza, Panhard, Peugeot, Renault or Voisin, but also from a bunch of marques few of us ever encountered, e.g. Ariès, Charron, Cottin & Degouttes, Delaunay-Belleville, Farman, Léon Bollée, Luc Court, Mors, Motobloc, Rochet-Schneider, Rolland-Pilain, Sizaire-Berwick, Théophile Schneider, Turcat-Méry, Unic…

The Lorraine-Dietrich range was composed of three chassis: a smaller 12HP (2.3 litre, 4-cyl. OHV), a massive 30HP (6.1 litre, 6-cyl. side-valve) and the 15HP (a.k.a B3-6) we are looking at here, which sported a 3445cc 6-cyl. OHV engine with a hemi head. In standard road guise, as here, the motor delivered around 50hp, enabling the car to reach about 100 kph, depending on the body.

However, with a little tweaking, power could be upped to well over 100hp, without compromising the engine’s exceptional reliability. This enabled the 3.4 litre Lorraine to accumulate a number of victories on the track. In 1924, the 24 of Le Mans race was won by Bentley, but Lorraine-Dietrich came second and third. The B3-6 won outright in 1925 and 1926. This made the 3.4 litre chassis Lorraine-Dietrich’s star product, and soon the other two models were dropped.

But the success of the B3-6 was not enough to ensure the future of the company’s car branch. Even prior to the onset of the Great Depression, the top brass had deduced that there would be ever-diminishing returns in the luxury chassis game, so they divested themselves of the Parisian factory, selling it to the Société Générale d’Aéronautique, who were chiefly interested in the aero-engine and armaments side of the equation. At this point, the “Dietrich” part of the name was also lopped off.

The B3-6 chassis carried on until about 1931, when it was replaced by a 4.1 litre model (above) that was heavier and more expensive – quite unsuited to the times, in other words. Production petered out by 1933-34 and the Lorraine cars were no more. The armaments side carried on, building one of the only French WW2 tanks that was worth a damn (albeit with a Delahaye 135 engine!). The railcars, heaters and various white goods side of the De Dietrich group, which also diversified into pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals, carried on. It’s still around and still controlled by the family that founded it centuries ago. Old money never dies.

But let’s bring it back to the subject at hand, our blue 1924 saloon.

The interior is much harder to gauge as to its age, but however old it may be, it’s a thing of beauty. Interestingly, Lorraine-Dietrichs didn’t for the “high-class-therefore-RHD” thing that many French and Italian marques were so enamoured with in those days. The 20HP 4-litre cars of the early ‘30s were RHD, but this slightly more modest 15HP was not like that.

It’s not like that instrument panel was overcrowded, yet it seems there wasn’t room in there for the temperature gauge, which thankfully is located pretty close to the driver (as opposed to sitting right on the radiator) for easier monitoring. In the daytime, anyway.

If this handsome body had been made at the same time as the chassis, it would not have looked like this. Cars in the mid-‘20s were square. I mean right angles all over, especially the windows and roofline. Here, those are smoothed out – very early ‘30s.

Fortunately, the coachbuilder is easily identified. And thus we fall into another rabbit hole: what the deuce is Million-Guiet?

The firm was founded in the 1850s and successfully adapted its carriage shop to the automobile age by the turn of the century. They even briefly produced electric cars under the Guiet name, but the big Francs were in luxury coachbuilding, which became their specialty in the early 20^th Century.

In the ‘20s, Million-Guiet became a very big player in the custom coachwork field, even advertising their wares in foreign countries. French luxury cars were regularly clothed by the carrossier and, conversely, prestigious foreign chassis imported in France, from Packard and Rolls-Royce to Alfa Romeo and Minerva, were brought to Million-Guiet for a body (or a re-body, as the case may be).

But if we look at a sampling of the carrosserie’s output in the ‘20s, our Lorraine-Dietrich’s smoothed contours are notably absent. The top two are a Voisin C3 (left) and a Peugeot 174 (right) from 1923; in the middle, we have a 1925 Isotta-Fraschini phaeton (left) and a 1927 Hispano-Suiza H6 roadster (right). Tellingly, the bottom row shows a mid-‘20s Farman A6B with a newer (circa 1930) limousine body (left) and a 1925 Mercedes-Benz 640K re-bodied in 1929 (right).

Million-Guiet’s traditional production carried on into the ‘30s, but the bulk of the coachbuilder’s output came to feature a highly distinctive look, with smoothed edges and, at least in the earliest days, trendy cycle fenders.

Sometime in 1928, an aircraft designer called Jean de Viscaya invented (and patented) a novel all-alloy body construction. These bodies were not only more solid than traditional wood-framed car bodies, but also about 250kg lighter. Million-Guiet bought the license in 1929 and started using the Viscaya patent (they called it “Toutalu”, i.e. all-aluminium) on various chassis.

The Toutalu body could be easily adapted to fit on most marques: Talbot (top left, 1929); Panhard (top right, 1930) or Citroën (middle right, 1931) show the earlier style, with cycle fenders. The Hispano-Suiza cabriolet (middle left) is by Million-Guiet, but not a Toutalu, as the system was only possible with closed cars. Still, the fenders on that 1930 car look very similar to the others. By the mid-‘30s, things were evolving slightly, as we can see with this ’33 Renault (bottom right) and 1934 Hotchkiss. That last one, in particular, looks pretty close to our Lorraine, fender-wise…

Because their chassis were already on the heavy side, quite a few early ‘30s Lorraines did get Toutalu bodies, like this 1932 example. It would have made sense, around that same year, for the owner of a slightly older model to take their still presentable B3-6 to Million-Guiet and get a new-looking berline from a dated torpédo.

There was one major drawback to the Toutalu bodies: their shape, which was an integral part of the design, was still rather squarish. And by the mid-‘30s, automobile styling was moving away from that paradigm and into the rounded world of streamlining. Million-Guiet figured the time had come for them to quit the custom body trade and embrace the one form of transport that would remain pretty squarish no matter what: buses, trolleys and rolling stock. They remained in business until the mid-‘50s thanks to this new niche, even manufacturing their own buses under the Tubauto brand after the war.

That’s pretty much all I could dig up on the makers of this delightful car’s chassis and body. I suppose the latter’s aluminium construction will have helped in its preservation over the past 90-plus years. Lightness and sturdiness are not a given in the classic car world, but this old-timer managed to combine these rather well.

As to the chassis, it’s no Bentley Speed Six, but it got the job done. It’s a pity that the conglomerate that created it did not seize the opportunity brought about by its racing success to become a sort of French BMW, but the De Dietrichs approached (and subsequently left) the car business with a commendably realistic attitude – take your Le Mans trophies and leave the race before you crash.