Would You Drive Across the Sahara in a 1922 Citroën on Tracks?

Attempts to tame the Sahara Desert spawned some seriously cool, strange, and innovative vehicles during the 20th century. French truck manufacturer Berliet built a six-wheeled behemoth named T100 to work in oil fields, and Citroën added a second engine to the 2CV to make it four-wheel-drive, but a French engineer named Adolphe Kégresse beat them both to the punch by developing a clever track system that allowed just about any car to drive through deep sand. The first car to successfully cross the Sahara was a 1922 Citroën fitted with Kégresse tracks, and it was displayed in full desert regalia at the Retromobile show.

Born in 1879, Kégresse moved to Russia in 1903 and worked as a mechanic for a railway company. His career took an unexpected turn when a train carrying none other than Czar Nicholas II got stuck on a frozen turntable on a winter morning. He got the train moving again and was offered a job as one of the Czar’s mechanics on the spot. Two years later, he was appointed technical director of the royal car fleet.

One day, Kégresse received a request that must have made the initial “come work for the Czar of Russia” sound a little boring. Czar Nicholas II enjoyed hunting wolves in the winter, but the cars that he owned tended to get stuck in the snow. His mission was to solve this problem and his solution was unusual, to put it mildly.

He took a car (the make and model is lost to history), hooked up a pair of skis to the front axle, and fitted a track system that he developed on his own to the back wheels. There; problem solved. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but by 1913 he had patented his invention (that presumably succeeded in facilitating the Czar’s hunting habits).

Fast-forward to 1919. Kégresse was back in France and looking for work. He met André Citroën, who had just founded the company that bears his name, through an acquaintance, and mentioned the track system he still held the patent to. Citroën was so impressed that he formed a partnership with Kégresse, patented the system in France, and created a tracks department within his company. The tracks were tested in the coldest and snowiest parts of France, as well as by driving a car up the stairs (!) of a fancy hotel in Paris.

It’s in the sand that the Kégresse system really proved its mettle. Driving across the Sahara was impossible in the 1920s. The only way to travel across the dunes was on the back of a camel, which lacked features such as a multi-speed transmission, suspension, and headlights. Kégresse and Citroën saw the desert as the ideal proving ground for the tracks, and they spent over a year and a half preparing a demonstration.

On December 17, 1922, a convoy of five nearly identical Citroën models fitted with Kégresse-designed tracks left Touggourt, in Algeria, and set off for Timbuktu, in Mali. The roughly 2,000-mile trek took them straight through the Sahara, where roads were as non-existent as the GPS we rely on today. Beyond the tracks, the cars were equipped with numerous storage compartments to carry maps, parts, tools, a metric crapload of guns (this is a technical term), a suitably large quantity of ammunition, drinking water, medication, and camping gear.

Each car was powered by a 20-horsepower, 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine bolted to a three-speed manual transmission. They had a top speed of 25 mph, which might be why the one shown above was nicknamed the Scarabée d’Or (“Golden Beetle”), but it was probably faster than a camel and it likely smelled better.

The convoy reached Timbuktu precisely 21 days after leaving Touggourt, which was an unbelievable feat. The same trip would have taken six or seven months on the back of a camel (or maybe several camels).

Kégresse’s tracks worked as advertised, if not better, but the system didn’t catch on. Citroën couldn’t find enough drivers who were bold, curious, or foolish enough to drive across the desert on a regular basis to justify mass production. Kégresse and Citroën later sent other cars across the Sahara, but Michelin shut down the tracks department when it bought Citroën in 1934. It wasn’t the only “what the hell are you spending money on?” call made by the new owners: the V-8-powered Traction Avant was canned as well.