When Renault took to the sky: revisiting the elegant 1930s Caudron Rafale racing plane

The automotive and the aeronautical are natural bedfellows, and there have been many manufacturers with a hand in both. Mention Rolls-Royce to an airline captain and he’ll assume you’re referring to a jet-engine, not John Lennon’s limousine. BMW powered the Luftwaffe. Mitsubishi, long before it built Shoguns and Lancer Evos, had few repeat customers on the basis that they were mostly kamikaze pilots.

In pre-war France, cars and planes were treated as art forms or haute couture. Both were viewed as a showcase for national ingenuity, and in 1934 Renault took to the skies by supplying the engine for the Caudron Rafale C.460 racing plane you see here.

Drink in that simple, rakish 1930s design. The fuselage is astonishingly slender, fashioned primarily from spruce and birch plywood over a lightweight structure. Magnesium components reduce weight further, while a snug inverted engine and retractable landing gear eliminate unnecessary resistance.

The canopy barely disturbs the aircraft’s silhouette; it’s almost submerged within its spine. Even stationary, this thing looks like it’s doing 300mph out of the pages of the Boy’s Own Paper. It’s all about speed; about cutting through the air like a sabre.

It was built to compete in the Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe race, a 300km speed trial that took place high above the patchwork of fields and rustic villages that separate Etampes and Chartres, to the south of Paris. The colour Bleu de France transformed engineering into national iconography.

In 1933, fascinated by aviation and the world of amateur air racing, Louis Renault bought the Caudron aircraft company. The Rafale takes its name from a gust of wind. Its designer was Marcel Riffard who, in 1910 at the age of 23, had invented the first aircraft to be made of metal.

His other innovations include the medical aircraft. Following Renault’s takeover of Caudron, he began designing aerodynamic motor cars, such as the 1934 record-breaking Renault Nervasport land speed car and the Renault Etoile Filante (Shooting Star) gas turbine-powered machine, which set a powertrain record of 191mph in 1956 (and went on to inspire a 2025 Renault concept car).

The Rafale, though, is arguably his most handsome legacy, and legendary aviators such as Maurice Arnoux, Raymond Delmotte and Hélène Boucher queued up to fly it. Boucher, who was among the most pioneering female pilots and a major celebrity of the day, set a class record speed of 284mph in a Rafaele C.450 (as well as a women’s speed record), which Delmotte beat a few months later in the upgraded C.460 (the difference was its undercarriage, allowing for retractable wheels), by going 314.32mph on Christmas Day 1934. He won the Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe the following May at an average speed of 277.5mph.

The C.460 was originally powered by an air-cooled, supercharged, 8-litre Renault 6Q inverted six-cylinder engine producing 325bhp. Prior to Delmotte’s record attempt, its displacement was enlarged to 9.5-litres, producing 365bhp, which drives a Ratier two-position variable-pitch propeller.

While this racing engine survives, the single C.450 and three C.460s built do not. Everything, including the design plans, was lost during the Second World War and the C.460 you see here is a painstaking replica that’s been totally restored during the last two years under Renault’s watchful eye by Aéro Restauration Service in Dijon.

Bruno Ducreux is the plane’s pilot and chief restorer. Preparing this aircraft after it had sat unused for more than a decade in California was an operation that required extensive work to the entire airframe.

‘The plane is flying well, although it’s not an easy plane to fly,’ Ducreux tells Wallpaper*. ‘You need a lot of power to keep it flying. There is no visibility because you sit really at the back of the plane. The cockpit is very tight and you can’t really move your head. And it lands very fast, at 160km/h. However, it’s very controllable and fun to fly.’

Ninety-two years after first captivating spectators on the ground, there’s a Rafale skimming the clouds once again at French airshows, connecting modern audiences with one of the most elegant aircraft of the interwar period. It’s also inspired the name of a contemporary Renault; the midsize hybrid crossover Rafale.

Shame it doesn’t ape one of Marcel Riffard’s streamliners, as it’s rather boxier than that of his oeuvre. After the airborne Rafale has done the rounds, it will see out its days at Renault’s future heritage museum at Flins, Les Collections, which will open in 2027.

A design masterpiece, the winged Rafale remains graceful even when viewed in a hangar. There are no decorative flourishes, because none are needed. Its aesthetic emerges from airflow, balance and proportion. It shares as much with the minimalist furniture of Jean Prouvé or the architecture of Robert Mallet-Stevens as it does with conventional aviation.

Marcel Riffard’s goal was to win air races, yet the Rafale endures because it captures something more elusive than speed records. It represents the romance of 1930s modernism itself, rendered in wood, aluminium and magnesium, with a classy coat of French blue paint.

Renault.co.uk, @RenaultUK