he question of who originated the daring 1930s Figoni & Falaschi body style known as the Goutte d’Eau (‘drop of water’ or ‘teardrop’) is a moot point. What is clear, however, is that it reached its apogee in the glorious Talbot coupés such as this outstanding example.

The fastback Goutte d’Eau – prosaically recorded as Figoni Style Number 9220 in the company’s records – was undeniably the coachbuilder’s masterpiece. It was probably blind jealousy that prompted William Lyons of Jaguar to castigate its voluptuous curves as ‘positively indecent’, though that didn’t prevent him from cribbing the Teardrop’s styling cues. A purer, less-mannered expression of aerodynamic perfection than its contemporary, the Bugatti Atlantic, the Goutte d’Eau’s surfaces were seemingly sculpted by the wind, its rear view – the only one that lesser motorists ever got of a Goutte d’Eau on the road – defined by Figoni’s trademark Gothic arch wings.

Success may well have many fathers, and the Teardrop had three possible parents – company founder Joseph Figoni, his partner Ovidio Falaschi and illustrator Géo Ham – but  at this distance, attribution is impossible. Figoni was a practical coachbuilder with a natural sense of line and rhythm, Falaschi the successful businessman who regarded himself as a ‘veritable couturier of automotive coachwork’, while Ham had an informed artist’s eye for car styling. Any or all of them could have come up with this iconic, sensuous shape.

It’s impossible, too, to determine which of the partners brought in Géo Ham (born Georges Hamel) as a consultant during 1936, and controversy has reigned ever since as 
to how much influence Ham had over subsequent Figoni & Falaschi designs.

What is certain is that Ham sketched a showstopper of a design for the Delahaye 135 roadster that was the centrepiece of the firm’s stand at that year’s Paris Salon. Extolled by a contemporary journalist as ‘seemingly moulded by the wind itself’, the Delahaye was bought on the spot by Prince Aly Khan for FF150,000 – double the price of a normal Coupe des Alpes Delahaye.

A contemporary article in the French press described it as ‘a two/three-seater aerodynamic cabriolet by Figoni & Falaschi-Géo Ham, also designed for Bugatti and Delage chassis’, implying that the artist had collaborated with the coachbuilder on other cars. And Géo Ham also echoed the teardrop shape in a fantasy drawing of a speeding scarlet coupé that appeared on the cover of the 1936 ‘Automobile et Tourisme’ issue of the popular magazine L’Illustration.

After the Salon, Joseph Figoni, claiming that he had been the ‘ideas man’ and that Géo Ham had only collaborated on that one show car, brought an ill-tempered lawsuit against the artist. If so, why had Figoni employed Ham at all? In any case, the ‘Géo Ham’ design had been the catalyst that created what we now recognise as the distinctive Figoni & Falaschi line, and it can be argued that they would never have achieved this without Ham’s input.

The origins of the Figoni & Falaschi company were as humble as could be. In 1897 the Figoni family had moved from their home town of Piacenza in the northern Italian province of Emilia-Romagna to seek their fortune in Paris, taking their three-year-old son Giuseppe with them.

While 
still very young, Giuseppe – who Frenchified his name to ‘Joseph’ – was apprenticed to a charron (wainwright) named Vaché or Vachet in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine.
According to stylist and car collector Philippe Charbonneaux, who knew him well, Figoni was ‘a very clever artist: he had a fine, inherent sense of design and knew exactly what he wanted at all times… he consistently tried to maintain a position in the forefront 
of innovation’.

Boulogne and its neighbouring suburb Billancourt, nestling in the first great sweep of the River Seine as it left Paris, formed precisely the right environment for this talented youngster to study the past, present and future of transportation at the end of the first decade of the 20th century.

Bounded to the north by the Bois de Boulogne, where the elegant carriages and automobiles of Parisian high society sauntered daily, and near the Longchamps racecourse, focus of the equine world, Boulogne-Billancourt was the domicile of the aristocratic coachbuilder Kellner et ses Fils, and the Renault, Gobron-Brillié and Werner automobile factories. It was also the cradle of French aircraft production, home to the Astra airship company and the Voisin, Pischof & Koechlin and Esnault-Pelterie aircraft works. Since 1904 the world’s first facility for testing aircraft models had been in operation at nearby Chalais-Meudon.

Figoni historian Benoit Bocquet records that, before setting up on his own account, Joseph Figoni had worked for the Nieuport and Blériot aeroplane companies, which in those wood-and-canvas days employed many coachbuilding techniques (and ingenious weight-saving ideas) in the construction of their flying machines. He then joined Lavocat & Marsaud, established in 
1911 in Boulogne-sur-Seine and best-known for its distinctive sports bodies on Bugatti chassis. While studying streamlining at Meudon and in the Eiffel wind tunnel, Figoni befriended aerodynamicist Jean Andreau, who was to work with him during the 1930s.

After wartime military service, Figoni opened a body repair shop in Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1923 and by 1925 was designing and building complete bodies. He soon earned a name for imaginative styling, specialising in touring and sporting bodies for the gilded youth of France on the finest chassis, such as Delage, Hispano-Suiza, Bugatti and Ballot; even three Duesenberg Model Js.

Figoni-bodied cars were successful at Le Mans. Victory in 1932 by the Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 of Sommer and Chinetti, followed by 
a win in 1933 by another Alfa crewed by Nuvolari and Sommer, sparked demand that resulted in well-deserved expansion.

To finance that, in 1935 Figoni entered into partnership with Tuscan businessman and marketing expert Ovidio Falaschi. It was from that point that the more fluid style associated with Figoni & Falaschi (and which earned it the unhappy nickname ‘Phoney and Flashy’ from conservative British enthusiasts) emerged. Figoni, who had up to then built his body-form maquettes from iron strips, turned to sculpting scale models in clay, which were then translated into full-scale wooden maquettes by his craftsmen.

While some of the bodies Figoni & Falaschi produced during the late 1930s and after 
the war tended towards self-parody, with bulbous, all-enveloping front wings that did little for steering lock and made tyre-changing a nightmare, their Teardrop Talbot-Lagos of the late 1930s represented the high point of the streamlined era.

Yet another Italian emigré, Tony Lago, was behind the success of the Talbot-Lago. One 
of the motor industry’s more successful chameleons, he was known as ‘Antonio’ in 
his native Italy, ‘Anthony’ in England and ‘Antoine’ in France. When the dapper Lago moved to England in the 1920s, he anglicised his wartime Italian Army rank and became 
Major Tony Lago.

Initially he marketed OHV conversion kits for prosaic family sidevalves before in the late 1920s acquiring the foreign rights to the Wilson ‘self-changing’ transmission and the British agency for Isotta-Fraschini. When the rest of the ailing Anglo-French Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq group was swallowed up by Rootes Brothers in 1934, neat financial juggling enabled Lago to snatch control of the French Talbot company from under their noses. He had to market his cars as ‘Darracqs’ in Britain to avoid confusion with Rootes’ entirely different London-built Talbots.

Once in command of Automobiles Talbot at Suresnes, Lago asked his chief engineer, Walter Becchia, to create a new 4.0-litre car based on the old 3.0-litre Talbot, a real grand routier. In its sports-racing guise, the new car’s power unit had three carburettors 
instead of two and a neat cross-over pushrod cylinder head with hemispherical combustion chambers. Naturally, the new Talbot also had 
a Wilson pre-selector transmission.

Its ultimate triple-carburettor T150C SS incarnation (‘C’ for competition, referring to the car’s racing success, and ‘SS’ for ‘super sports’), of which fewer than 30 were built, was introduced in August 1937 at the Paris-Nice Criterium de Tourisme. Built on the short (2.65m) wheelbase competition chassis, the new model boasted a large-capacity sump, drilled handbrake lever, dual braking and a higher compression ratio. Steering was ‘high-geared and quick… giving an entirely positive and easily maintained control over the car’s position on the road.’

Ten of the 11 fastback Goutte d’Eau Talbot-Lagos were built on the T150C SS chassis, all with detail differences, plus four of the five similar ‘Jeancart’ notchbacks (style 9221), which had greater luggage room at the eponymous first owner’s request. A further brace of coupés included the notorious 
‘Stinky’, raced in the ’40s on the Californian streets and dry lakes by playboy Tommy Lee.

Perhaps the T150’s finest competition success came in 1938 when a pair of privately entered Gouttes d’Eau – ‘straight out of a concours d’elegance’, according to the ACO’s official history – competed at Le Mans, and 
one finished third overall, behind two open-wheeled ‘Competition’ 135MS Delahayes!

But this was clearly a car tailor-made for concours success, a fact not lost on the former Folies Bergères exotic dancer Stella Mudge, daughter of a high-wire-walking Cockney publican from Bow, and the third wife of Maharajah Paramjit Singh of Kapurthala. 
She even had her wedding-present Teardrop repainted and reupholstered several times to match her frocks at various concours.

The featured car (chassis 90112, Figoni job no 681) was delivered in May 1938 to one M Toussaint who ran the Casino at Namur, Belgium, until the end of World War Two. 
He presented the car at the 1939 Brussels Concours and the Deauville Concours d’Elegance on Bastille Day, a few weeks before war broke out.

Subsequent history is unknown until it was discovered in storage in Belgium in the 1950s. It had been partly dismantled, possibly for a rebuild that never happened; consequently, when 90112 was acquired by the OFF Collection of Bill Johnston and Ron Ellenbaas (‘It stands for “Only For Fun”,’ they declare), based in Richland, Michigan, in the early 2000s, the car was shabby but remarkably complete, and one of the most original surviving Teardrops.

‘It’s a piece of artwork,’ said Bill Johnston. ‘Some people have artwork on their wall – some people have the joy of driving.’

Nevertheless, the decision was made that the Teardrop should be completely rebuilt in the workshops of RM Restorations in Chatham, Ontario, where it was dismantled and a detailed inventory taken. To ensure absolute authenticity, original features of other surviving cars were photographed and documented for comparison.

The Teardrop’s chassis required little more than cleaning and repainting and the drivetrain, though complete, was rebuilt 
and cosmetically refurbished. Suspension, steering and brakes were rebuilt and reinstalled. While most of the original wooden framework survived, every joint was taken apart, cleaned and remade. Rotten members – primarily in the lower doors – were replaced by new pieces fabricated exactly like the originals.

Much of the sheet metal was saved, with some new fabrication using identical materials and methods to rectify old repairs. The interior was retrimmed in deep red leather to the original pattern and the wood trim was repaired and refinished. All the instruments were restored, and a new wiring harness made up. After hundreds of hours of preparation, the original silver and grey two-tone paint finish was recreated.

The work completed, RM Restorations said: ‘Any Talbot-Lago is a rare and delightful thing today. The startling beauty and underlying engineering excellence of the Teardrop coupés makes them the crowning achievement of the company. The restoration of an automobile of this calibre and historical importance is almost a sacred trust.’

That has been proved several times: in 2009, the OFF Collection’s Teardrop won Best in Class in the European Classic Closed class, the Art Center College of Design Award, and Most Elegant Closed Car at Pebble Beach, and it took Best of Show at 2010’s Meadow Brook concours. Never has the phrase ‘handsome is as handsome does’ been better justified.