Voisin C1 History

When Gabriel Voisin pivoted from building wartime aircraft to automobiles in 1919, he took the same engineering logic with him: aluminum construction, meticulous weight distribution, and an insistence on the Knight sleeve-valve engine, which ran silently compared with the poppet-valve units used by his rivals.

The C1 was a large, formal limousine powered by a 4.0-litre inline-four Knight engine producing around 80 horsepower. Only approximately 70 examples were constructed before the design was superseded, but they established Voisin's reputation for mechanical refinement and set the tone for every chassis that followed.