Peak Performance

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The Panhard Dyna X saloon was a strange-looking little car, but it was exceptionally well engineered. It was sensible of Panhard, therefore, to supply rolling frames to other companies to equip with their own bodies, which were typically of a sporting nature and impishly pretty. Two friends, Bernard Pichon and André Parat – the former a wealthy but unskilled aesthete with an eye for car design and the latter a natural-born metal craftsman – were among the less well-remembered partnerships to reclothe the Dyna.

Beginning in 1949, in a workshop in Sens, Pichon-Parat began by converting Ford Vedettes into estate cars and coupés, before turning to sports bodies with Renault 4CV underpinnings. By 1953, they had some Panhard frames in their possession and presented the Dolomites at that year’s Paris Salon. Like most of the other sporting Dyna variants, it was low-slung and sleek with unconventional but endearing looks.

Originally bodied in steel, the cars proved too heavy for the little flat-twin engine, so aluminium was used for the second series. Lightweight and nimble, they proved ideal for road rallies and attained some competition success, but production was over by 1957, with only around 30 examples having been built and just three known to survive.

We inspect a rare survivor in the November issue of The Automobile, on sale now.

(Words Zack Stiling, photography Henri Thibault)

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