Race To The Future

In June 1907 five automobiles, with sponsors including Louis Vuitton, Pirelli, Dunlop and Mumm Champagne, roared over a start line near the Forbidden City in Beijing. Two continents, two months and 8,000 miles later, they had changed the world.

Their quest took the racers over mountain ranges, through forests and across deserts. With few roads, they drove on muddy tracks amidst donkeys, carts and people on foot. Their automobiles crashed through spindly wooden bridges and had to be floated across rivers. Rifts developed between rival participants and a global audience followed every twist and turn with bated breath, devouring reports telegraphed to journalists across the world.

The Peking-Paris took place on the precipice of a new world, born out of profound social, cultural and technological change. Race to the Future is not only a gripping, immersive narrative of the race, capturing the unbelievable events that took place, but it is a kaleidoscopic exposé revealing how this overlooked moment in history shaped how we live today.

From the departure of the horse economy and birth of the automobile, gendered marketing and the secret history of women in motoring, and the invention of the telegraph and emergence of global mass media, to the Communist Revolution in Russia, mass production in America, the subsequent rivalry between the countries, and the First World War, which ultimately redefined the course of history.