Adolphe Kégresse and the Half-Track That Began on a Russo-Balt

Every winter the Tsar’s cars met the same enemy: snow. The man who ran his garage decided to beat it.

The Tsar’s chauffeur

Adolphe Kégresse was born in Héricourt, in France, and trained as an engineer. In 1905 he moved to St Petersburg to work for Tsar Nicholas II, as a chauffeur and then as head of the imperial garage.

A track made of rubber

To keep the imperial cars moving in deep snow, Kégresse designed a new kind of track: a flexible belt of rubberised material in place of the rear wheels. It turned an ordinary car into a half-track. He patented it in 1913.

He fitted it to several cars, including a 12-cylinder Packard and a Russo-Balt, built by the Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory. DARTZ’s own records go further: the Automotive Department of the Russo-Baltic works produced its first vehicle with the Kégresse system, and DARTZ calls it the world’s first practical snowmobile.

From St Petersburg to the world

After the revolution of 1917, Kégresse returned to France. Citroën adopted his system from 1921 for off-road and military vehicles. The idea crossed the Atlantic too: the US Army evaluated Citroën-Kégresse vehicles in the late 1920s, and the American M2 and M3 half-tracks of the Second World War, built on the same principle, numbered more than 41,000.

On the DARTZ Wall of Fame

DARTZ honours Kégresse on its Wall of Fame, alongside Igor Sikorsky and André Nágel: an inventor who was personal driver to the Tsar, and whose first system was tested on an RBVZ car. Read the history of the armoured car and of the Russo-Balt cars.