Jacques Potherat 1942-2001 

he death of my old friend Jacques Potherat while some of us were still making our way home from his Vintage Montlhéry meeting - an event which he conceived and ran - leaves an immense gap in the French old car scene.

A long-time member of the Brooklands Society, he was made an honorary member last year in recognition of his achievement in keeping the "Brooklands Spirit" alive with his annual Vintage Montlhéry meetings, which he instituted in 1998 to give a proper showcase for his beloved pre-1940 cars.

Motoring shaped Jacques' life: his grandfather Henri "Bon Boulot" Devaux was one of the irrepressible duo who built the tandem-seated Bédélia - France's first and most eccentric cyclecar - between 1909-20 and in the 1930s traversed the Sahara in a supercharged Auburn. Instead of telling the young Potherat fairy stories, his "Grandma Bédélia" Violette Devaux would take him to the imposing monument to motoring pioneer Emile Levassor at the Porte Maillot in Paris and tell him of the victory of Levassor's Panhard-Levassor "Number 5" in the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race.

While still in his teens, Jacques began rescuing vintage cars - a Rally stored beneath the banking at Montlhéry, the last Darmont, abandoned in the company's deserted works at Courbevoie - and got to know many of the great names of French motoring history.

He became a freelance motoring and motorcycling journalist, and worked for many French magazines, including the Fanatique de l'Automobile, a pioneering journal of motoring history. Its proprietor Serge Pozzoli - whose Normandy chateau not only housed a huge collection of vintage cars but what was probably France's only privately owned guillotine - took Jacques under his wing. Consequently, Jacques knew everyone of importance in the French old car world and created a loose-knit association of pre-war sports car owners called the "Syndicat Cyclecariste" for which the sole criterion for membership was that you had to be one of his wide circle of friends.

His knowledge of the motor industry of Paris was encyclopaedic: I recall a crowded day in the 1970s visiting the former car factories of Levallois and Courbevoie on the pillion of Jacques' vee-twin Moto Guzzi which included such excitements as a trip on the pavement the wrong way up a one-way street to find an historic Peugeot works!

As a reporter on the news magazine l'Express in the 1980s Jacques led an adventurous life. He twice entered the gruelling Paris-Dakar rally and lived with the Afghan Mujahadin rebels when they were fighting the Russian occupation. "I became familiar with the sound of Kalashnikov bullets whistling over my 
head," he said...

Returning to motoring journalism, Jacques hosted a popular classic car programme on the French cable TV channel Canal Jimmy, but was forced to give this up when he contracted a debilitating disease in the late 1990s.  Most cruelly for a man whose life was communication and motoring, his illness - a rare tropical disease that defied the medical profession - robbed him of the power of speech and confined him to a wheelchair yet he bravely continued writing articles on his laptop right to the end. He enjoyed his vintage motoring as long as possible, too, having hand controls fitted to his 41/2-litre Blower Bentley when his legs failed him.

A dedicated owner of Kimber era M.G.s, Jacques was a great Anglophile who joined the Vintage Sports Car Club in the early 1960s and was 
elected to its committee some 35 years later. He took his duties very seriously, coming to England to attend the monthly committee meetings until his illness compelled him reluctantly to resign. He was an honorary member of the Benjafield Racing Club.

A source of great pride for Jacques was the reunion of no fewer than six Bédélias at Vintage Montlhéry 2000. Happily, Jacques enjoyed this year's Vintage Montlhéry meeting and was able to see the maiden outing of his final project, a 1913 2.6-litre Type AK Delage restored by James, the son of his closest English friend Colvin Gunn who had died exactly a month before.

His children Quentin and Adélaïde and his second wife Jacqueline shared his enthusiasms and were so supportive in his illness: we had all hoped for a miracle that would restore him to health but it never came.

David Burgess-Wise