CarBrandLogos archive · Panhard · 1948

PanhardDyna X

An aluminium featherweight with a flat-twin, and a giant-killer at Le Mans.

Photo: Lars-Göran Lindgren Sweden · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Panhard history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Panhard Dyna X, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Postwar France taxed large cars heavily and had very little steel, so Panhard rebuilt itself around the opposite of everything it had made before. The Dyna X came from Jean-Albert Grégoire's Aluminium Français prototype, and Panhard kept its central ideas: an aluminium body and structure, front-wheel drive, and an air-cooled flat-twin of 610cc, later 745cc and 851cc, with torsion bar suspension all round.

Panhard Dyna X utilitaire · Florival fr · Public domain

1952 Panhard Dyna X 120 Canadienne in Bremen, rear right

Design and engineering

The result weighed almost nothing, which is the whole story. A car this light needed very little power to go well and very little fuel to go far, and the engine's rev-happy character gave it performance out of all proportion to its capacity. Bodies ran from a four-door berline to an estate, a cabriolet and a van.

1952 Panhard Dyna X 120 Canadienne in Bremen, rear right · Andrew Bone from Weymouth, England · CC BY 2.0

In production

Racing made the reputation. Small French constructors, chiefly DB and Monopole, built sports cars around Panhard's flat-twin and used them to win the Index of Performance at Le Mans repeatedly, a classification that rewarded distance covered against engine size and which the French took very seriously. For a decade the flat-twin was the engine of choice for anyone building a fast small car in France.