French Toast

We Meet the Product of a Talent Extraordinaire

- Alan Cathcart

Rider-engineers are a rare breed — especially those who are equally expert at each of the two disciplines, and at the highest level, capable of conceiving innovative, totally unique design solutions, then racing the result successfully themselves. Britain’s Peter Williams is rightly thought of as the paragon of such talented virtuosos, and by personally conceiving the John Player Norton Monocoque which he then rode to victory in the 1973 Isle of Man F750 TT, he’s made sure of his place in the record books for all time.

But there’s another less well-known figure outside his native France who in this, his 80th birthday year, deserves comparable admiration — especially since he was racing his own self-conceived monocoque-framed bike to 500GP rostrums two full years before the first Williams-designed Norton Monocoque ever turned a wheel. That man is Eric Offenstadt, universally known as Pépé, and he actually turned out to be even more multi-talented than Williams. That’s because his motorcycle race career bracketed a spell as a top level open wheelu F2/F3 car driver racing for such illustrious teams as Matra and Team Lotus, during which he defeated the likes of future world champions Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark, before returning to motorcycle racing to pick up where he’d left off eight years earlier.