Jules Goux (6 April 1885 - 6 March 1965) was a French racing driver and

Grand Prix motor racing Grand Prix motor racing, a form of motorsport competition, has its roots in organised automobile racing that began in France as early as 1894. It quickly evolved from simple road races from one town to the next, to endurance tests for car and ...

champion. He was also notable for being the first Frenchman, and the first

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

an driver, to win the

Indianapolis 500 The Indianapolis 500, formally known as the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race, and commonly called the Indy 500, is an annual automobile race held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) in Speedway, Indiana, United States, an enclave suburb of Indi ...

Biography

Influenced by the

Gordon Bennett Cup in auto racing As one of three Gordon Bennett Cups established by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., millionaire owner of the '' New York Herald'', the automobile racing award was first given in 1900 in France. In 1899 Gordon Bennett offered the ''Automobile Club de F ...

, Jules Goux began racing cars in his early twenties. Success came in 1909 on a circuit set up on roads around

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, near

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, when he won the

Catalan Cup Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...

, a victory he repeated the following year. Because of his racing success, along with Georges Boillot, he was invited by Peugeot Automobile to race for their factory team. As part of a four-man design team led by

Paul Zuccarelli Paolo "Paul" Zuccarelli (; 24 August 1886, Milan – 19 June 1913, Marcilly-la-Campagne, France) was an Italian racecar driver. Zuccarelli graduated in engineering in Brescia and took on racing shortly afterwards. In 1910 he moved to France. ...

and Ernest Henry, Goux helped develop a racecar powered by a radically new

Straight-4 A straight-four engine (also called an inline-four) is a four-cylinder piston engine where cylinders are arranged in a line along a common crankshaft. The vast majority of automotive four-cylinder engines use a straight-four layout (with the ...

engine using a twin

overhead cam An overhead camshaft (OHC) engine is a piston engine where the camshaft is located in the cylinder head above the combustion chamber. This contrasts with earlier overhead valve engines (OHV), where the camshaft is located below the combustion cha ...

Jules Goux au départ d'Indianapolis 500 en 1913

Jules Goux won the 1912 Sarthe Cup at

Le Mans Le Mans (, ) is a city in northwestern France on the Sarthe River where it meets the Huisne. Traditionally the capital of the province of Maine, it is now the capital of the Sarthe department and the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Le ...

driving a Peugeot, and in

1913 Events January * January 5 – First Balkan War: Battle of Lemnos – Greek admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis forces the Turkish fleet to retreat to its base within the Dardanelles, from which it will not venture for the rest of the ...

he travelled with the team to the

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to compete in the

race. Goux won the race, becoming the first non-American Indy 500 winner in history. Goux reportedly consumed four bottles of champagne while driving in the Indy 500 (then known as the International 500-Mile Sweepstakes Race) and was later quoted as saying, ''"Without the good wine, I would have not been able to win."'' The following year,

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

broke out in Europe and his racing career had to be put aside for service in the French military. At war's end, Goux returned to European Grand Prix motor racing. In 1921, driving for Ballot Automobile, he finished third in the French Grand Prix then won the inaugural

Italian Grand Prix The Italian Grand Prix ( it, Gran Premio d'Italia) is the fifth oldest national Grand Prix (after the French Grand Prix, the United States Grand Prix, the Spanish Grand Prix and the Russian Grand Prix), having been held since 1921. In 2013 it ...

at Brescia, Italy. For the next few years his racing career was marked by repeated problems and he did not return to the winners circle until 1926. That year, driving for

Bugatti Automobiles Ettore Bugatti was a German then French manufacturer of high-performance automobiles. The company was founded in 1909 in the then-German city of Molsheim, Alsace, by the Italian-born industrial designer Ettore Bugatti. The cars ...

in a T39A model, he won both the French Grand Prix at Miramas and the

European Grand Prix The European Grand Prix (also known as the Grand Prix of Europe) was a Formula One event that was introduced during the mid-1980s and was held every year from to , except in . During these years, the European Grand Prix was held in a count ...

at the Circuito Lasarte,

Indianapolis 500 results

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goux, Jules 1885 births 1965 deaths People from Valentigney French racing drivers Grand Prix drivers Indianapolis 500 drivers Indianapolis 500 winners French military personnel of World War I Sportspeople from Doubs