The Zaborowski family had been American for two centuries before anyone thought to pretend otherwise. They arrived in New Amsterdam as Zaborowskis — Albrycht, a Lutheran nobleman from Masovia, off the boat in 1662 with whatever a displaced Polish aristocrat carries across an ocean — and over generations they anglicised to Zabriskie and accumulated New Jersey land and Manhattan real estate and eventually the compounded Astor fortune, which had started in fur and calcified into Manhattan dirt and just kept growing. Seven acres in the city. Several blocks of Fifth Avenue. A money machine that required no operation. Just breathing.

In 1873, Martin Zabriskie attended his daughter’s wedding to a French count and came home with a different idea of himself. He changed the family name back to its Polish form. He declared himself Count of Montsaulvain. There was nothing behind this — no patent of nobility, no legitimate claim, nothing but the conviction of a very wealthy man that he deserved the name. The family accepted it. When you hold seven acres of Manhattan, people tend to accept things.

His son Elliott took the invented title to Europe and made it feel real on the race circuits of the Côte d’Azur. He drove for the Mercedes factory team in the early 1900s on the hillclimbs — narrow mountain roads, open cars, no guardrails, engine failures that became geography lessons at speed. Elliott was fast and apparently difficult to frighten. On 1 April 1903 he went up La Turbie outside Nice and did not come back down. His Mercedes left the road and hit a rock. The story that attached itself to his death, and would eventually attach itself to his son’s death as well, was that his gold cufflinks had jammed in the hand throttle.

Louis Vorow Zborowski was born on 20 February 1895 in Mayfair, London, the only child of two American-born parents. His mother, Margaret Laura Astor Carey, was a great-granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor Sr., and after Elliott died she moved with the boy to England. In 1910 she paid £17,500 for Higham Park, a neoclassical estate at Bridge in Kent, three miles south of Canterbury — 225 acres, a farm, twelve houses, and a 250-yard canal on the grounds, the longest in any English private garden. She immediately spent £50,000 renovating the house. Then she died, in 1911, leaving Louis alone at sixteen with approximately £11 million in cash, seven acres of Manhattan, several blocks of Fifth Avenue in New York, and the stables at Higham Park that would, within a decade, produce the loudest machines in England.

He accumulated at least eight motoring convictions before turning twenty.

The noise, when it fired, was not a mechanical sound. It was something closer to geological. It carried three miles.

There is no particular mystery about what happened next. His father had died at the wheel of a racing car. The money was so old and large it had its own gravity. What Louis did was find the most extreme possible use for both of those facts simultaneously, and he pursued it with the methodical focus of a man who has never had to think about money and therefore thinks about nothing except what he actually wants. He wanted speed. He had the estate, the stables, and the money, and sometime around 1919 or 1920 he sat down with Captain Clive Gallop.

Gallop was his school friend and a former Royal Flying Corps engineer — a man who had spent the war helping W.O. Bentley develop aero engines before designing the four-valves-per-cylinder head for Bentley’s first 3-litre road car. He knew what happened inside very large engines and what they couldn’t tolerate. For the bodywork, Zborowski turned to Bligh Brothers of Canterbury, a firm at 16 St Radigund’s Street that had been building horse-drawn carriages since the Napoleonic Wars. He eventually bought them outright. The process, reduced to its essentials, sounds almost reasonable: purchase surplus aeroplane engines from the War Disposals Board, mount them to pre-war Mercedes chassis, have Bligh Brothers clothe the result in hand-beaten aluminium, drive to Brooklands on trade plates.

What this produced was four machines. And the noise, which you need to understand before anything else makes sense.

Chitty Bang Bang 1 — 1921

The first engine was a Maybach Mb.IVa. Twenty-three thousand and ninety-three cubic centimetres. Six cylinders in line, the type that had powered German Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers during the war. Zborowski bolted it into a lengthened pre-war Mercedes chassis braced with flitch plates and rods, the bonnet running eight feet from firewall to tip, the whole thing weighing around 2,200 kilograms with sand ballast packed into the rear because without it the back wheels left the road. Starting required a half-axle from a B.E. aeroplane, a half-compression device, and someone working the dashboard magneto. When it fired, the noise was not really a mechanical sound. It was something closer to geological. It carried three miles.

The car debuted at Brooklands on Easter Monday, 28 March 1921. Zborowski had fitted it with a deliberately crude four-seat body and an oversized exhaust to mislead the handicappers — a ruse, and it worked. The bookmakers set 6-to-4 against him. He won the 100 mph Short Handicap at an average of 100.75 mph, lapping at 108.15 mph, beating André Boillot’s Sunbeam, then won a second race that same afternoon. By 1922 the car had been stripped to a two-seater and streamlined and lapped the circuit at 113.45 mph.

Its racing career ended at the September 1922 Brooklands meeting. A tyre burst at speed on the Members’ Banking. The car demolished a timing hut — it removed three fingers from an official who had been attempting to run — tore off its own front axle, and threw out the riding mechanic. Zborowski stayed in the seat. He climbed out and, according to at least one witness who was there, immediately lit a cigarette.

The Name

Where ’Chitty Bang Bang’ came from is genuinely disputed and probably will be forever. The most persuasive explanation traces back to a Royal Flying Corps song — a ’chitty’ being the leave pass that got an officer away from base for a weekend, and ’bang bang’ being the point of the exercise once he arrived. Gallop had served in the RFC. The other explanation, which Ian Fleming would later prefer when he came to write about it, was that the name imitated the sound of the Maybach idling: the staccato percussion of six large cylinders firing slowly, at low rpm, unhurried and tremendous. Both explanations may be true simultaneously, which is generally how it is with names that last.

Chitty Bang Bang 2 — 1921–22

The second car used an 18,825cc Benz Bz.IV aero engine — six cylinders, approximately 230 brake horsepower — in a shorter wheelbase Mercedes chassis with chain drive and Bligh Brothers coachwork. It lapped Brooklands at around 113 mph. In January 1922, Zborowski drove it across the Mediterranean and into the Sahara Desert with his wife Vi, Gallop, and a friend, following the tracks of Citroën’s Kégresse expedition. Not a thing many racing drivers do between seasons. It is the only original Chitty car known to survive, currently in private ownership in the United States.

Chitty Bang Bang 3 — 1922

The third car, called the White Mercedes for the obvious reason, was the most refined. A Mercedes 28/95 chassis. A 14,778cc single-overhead-camshaft Mercedes aero engine tuned from 160 to 180 brake horsepower. It lapped Brooklands at 112.68 mph and served primarily as personal transport — the car Zborowski drove between circuits, and the one he took to Stuttgart in 1924 when he went to negotiate his place on the Mercedes Grand Prix team. It was broken up after his death.

The Higham Special — 1923

The fourth and largest car mounted a 27-litre Liberty L-12 V12 aero engine, American-built, developing approximately 450 brake horsepower, in a twin-rail chassis using a gearbox and chain drive stripped from a pre-war Blitzen Benz. At roughly twenty feet in length it was the largest-capacity racing car ever to run at Brooklands. Zborowski reached 116 mph in it. The car was still unfinished when he died.

Canterbury, throughout all of this, had made its feelings official. The city passed a by-law prohibiting the Chitty cars from entering within the walls. Residents near Higham Park complained formally about the sound of a 23-litre Maybach being tested on country roads at irregular hours. In September 1924, weeks before Zborowski died, local residents brought action in the High Court against Brooklands itself. The case settled in July 1925 with the introduction of a mandatory exhaust silencer, a lozenge-shaped can with a fish-tail end that produced what became the Brooklands rattle and made, by most accounts, very little actual difference.

Some stories are too structurally perfect to verify, and the cufflinks story may be one of them.

The Broader Career

Zborowski’s racing life had expanded well beyond Brooklands by this point. He was Aston Martin’s primary financial patron throughout the early 1920s — his money the main reason the firm survived into that decade at all. He drove a Bugatti at the 1923 Indianapolis 500, retiring after 41 laps with engine trouble. At that year’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza he raced a Harry Miller single-seater. Mercedes watched all of this and made a decision. For the 1924 Italian Grand Prix they offered him a works drive in one of Ferdinand Porsche’s new 2-litre supercharged straight-eights. His teammates were the veteran Christian Werner and Count Giulio Masetti. Alfred Neubauer and Rudi Caracciola were among the reserves.

In September the Mercedes cars came south through the Alps from Stuttgart. Werner completed one practice lap of the Monza Autodrome and the car overheated so severely that all four machines were sent back to headquarters for redesign. The race was postponed several weeks.

19 October 1924

When it finally ran, Antonio Ascari led from the start in his Alfa Romeo P2. On the 45th lap, at the Lesmo curve, Zborowski lost control of his Mercedes. The car rolled twice. He was killed at the circuit.

He was twenty-nine.

Mercedes withdrew their remaining cars. Clive Gallop attended the three-day Monza inquiry and a separate investigation by Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, then arranged for the body to come home. The coffin went from Dover to Higham Park on Zborowski’s aged Mercedes truck — the same truck that had transported his racing cars to circuits across Europe. The truck broke down on the road; the steering column seized. Zborowski was buried at St James Churchyard, Burton Lazars, near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. The cufflinks story attached itself to all of this: he was said to have been wearing the same gold cufflinks his father had worn at La Turbie in 1903. Whether this is true is not known. Some stories are too structurally perfect to verify, and this may be one of them.

Aftermath

The estate was dispersed. Chitty 1 passed to the sons of Arthur Conan Doyle, who ran it at speed trials in the 1930s, exhibited it at Brooklands, and eventually left it in a corner of the circuit while the weather worked on it. Someone later sawed the chassis in half to get the gearbox out. The gearbox did not fit the car it was wanted for. Chitty 3 was sold and eventually broken up by subsequent owners. The Higham Special, still unfinished, was purchased from the estate by Welsh engineer J.G. Parry-Thomas for £125. He rebuilt it with four Zenith carburettors and his own piston design and renamed it Babs. In April 1926, on Pendine Sands in Wales, Parry-Thomas drove it to the World Land Speed Record at 171.02 mph. He returned on 3 March 1927 to reclaim the record from Malcolm Campbell and was killed when the car overturned. Babs was buried in the sand beside the accident site. It was excavated in 1969 and restored over fifteen years. It stands today at the Pendine Museum of Speed.

Zborowski had been collaborating with Captain J.E.P. Howey on a passenger-carrying miniature railway, 15-inch gauge, across the Kent marshes. Howey continued alone. The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway opened in 1927, fourteen miles of track that still carry passengers today. A locomotive at the Fairbourne Railway in Wales was named Count Louis in Zborowski’s honour and stayed there until 1988.

The Boy at Brooklands

In 1928 the widow sold Higham Park to Walter Whigham, chairman of Robert Fleming & Co. — the merchant bank that Ian Fleming’s grandfather had founded. Fleming visited as Whigham’s guest, walked the workshops, heard the stories from people who had been there for it.

But he had already seen the cars himself. In 1921, as a twelve-year-old at Eton, he had been at Brooklands and watched the first Chitty go through 100 mph. He had heard it before it came into view, the way you hear very large things before the sound fully resolves itself and you understand what you are actually listening to.

Forty years later, in 1961, recovering from a heart attack and forbidden the typewriter, Fleming wrote by hand the bedtime stories he had been telling his son Caspar about a magical car. The book he produced dedicated itself plainly: to the memory of the original CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG, built in 1920 by Count Zborowski on his estate near Canterbury. He described the Maybach engine, the chain-drive Mercedes chassis, the Bligh Brothers coachwork — he spelled it ’Blythe Brothers,’ his error — and the 1921 Brooklands victories with the intimate specificity of someone who had absorbed the details over years and never fully let them go. He added a third ’Chitty’ to the name. He gave the car the power of flight. Neither change was accurate. Both were beside the point.

Fleming died on 12 August 1964, his son Caspar’s twelfth birthday, in Canterbury, Kent — a few miles from where the stables had held the first car. The book was published two months after.

The Maybach engine from Chitty 1 ended up with a collector, offered as spare parts, which is what engines become when the car around them is gone. The machine that had gone through a timing hut at 113 mph and removed three fingers and left a riding mechanic on the Brooklands asphalt was, in the end, a source of components. The noise stopped. The pieces scattered. The name went on without the machine, picking up legend the way still water picks up leaves — without effort, without intent, because of the shape of the thing and the direction of things generally.

Canterbury is still there. The walls still stand. For about three years, a car built in the stables of a Kent estate by a boy who had inherited more than he could sensibly spend was too loud to enter them.