12. Anthony BELTOISE - The MyLittleRedCar column in AUTOHEROES #023

I was lucky enough to own one…

The Four Hundred Blows of Anthony Beltoise

With Jean-Pierre Beltoise as his father and François Cevert as his uncle, it was unthinkable not to find Anthony behind the wheel at a very young age.

Seven years old, my first car, the most breathtaking toy a child could hope to receive! It was a Bugatti baby.
My father, who lived and breathed high-precision mechanics, spared no expense when it came to giving his eldest son his first motorized vehicle. He was surely waiting for him to reach the age of reason. Indeed, I used all my reason to get up to all sorts of mischief!
I can admit it today, from that moment on, any motorized vehicle with two or four wheels was synonymous with great getaways between brothers, gymkhana between buddies and thrills for the neighborhood between screaming engines and crumpled metal.

The first to suffer the consequences was the little Bugatti, damaged while reversing. You have to imagine that my brother and I lived in a world where speed and performance were, if not a sacred duty, at least an invitation. Parisians during the week, we spent our holidays and weekends in the countryside near Montlhéry. On my Piwi 50 with a sidecar, I would take my little brother on obstacle-strewn courses through the surrounding meadows and forests. Shamelessly, we would "borrow" vehicles left at home by their owners. I remember completely wrecking a Honda N600 when I was about 14. While some kids were playing cowboys and Indians after the westerns on the movie channel La Dernière Séance, our favorite game was timing ourselves on improbable obstacle courses. That being said, I admit today to feeling a little pang of nostalgia for a Fiat 500 in pieces, that of my uncle, François Cevert.

We truly lived in the carefree spirit of teenagers for whom nothing is really serious as long as "we're having a good time." We often took friends along on our car rides, which never failed to give their parents a few cold sweats when they came home covered in scratches. We often heard, "You're not going to the Beltoises' place anymore!" My father taught me to drive at the age when I could barely touch the pedals, so naturally, denting some metal was a bit like doing a somersault on a scooter: nothing too serious.

After getting into all sorts of mischief, I ended up in boarding school, a bit like Truffaut's protagonist! That being said, the comparison ends there, because unlike Antoine Doinel, I had loving parents, and even if they were strict, they were nonetheless fair and attentive. They understood that if I wanted any chance of passing my baccalaureate, I had to stay away from the temptation of hanging out with my friends and racing my scooter between the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de la Concorde!
So there I was, stuck in a boarding school until my final, mangled car incident, the one that finally put me off. It happened on the A6 motorway; once again, I'd "borrowed" the family Nissan Prairie and I gave it a good, hard fender bender, losing control on a sweeping bend in the rain. The truck driver didn't notice a thing and just kept driving. The Nissan's rear door, however, definitely noticed, and I got quite a fright! When I got home, I concocted a story about finding the car in the same state in the parking lot of my tennis club.
Thinking about it, I wonder how I could have imagined my father, a champion of road safety, gullible enough to swallow that tall tale. It's also reminiscent of Truffaut's *The 400 Blows* when the psychologist asks young Antoine why his parents say he lies all the time, and he replies: "Well, I lie... I lie from time to time, that's all. Sometimes if I told them things that were true, they wouldn't believe me, so I prefer to tell lies."

From then on, I went straight! I put into practice all the lessons of rigor and "good conduct" promulgated by my father to win the ELF Volant the year I turned twenty-one, to start a real career and never again harm a Bugatti: twenty-one years old, three times the age of reason!

Anthony Beltoise for MyLittleRedCar

The intrepid Anthony, the helmet and the blue eyes of France, already scratched at 5 or 6 years old.

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