It's a 1911 Pierron cabriolet 2 places
The car presented was built by the MASS automobile company (L. Pierron) at Rue Armand Sylvestre, Courbevoie. Cars of this marque were always manufactured in France for an English importer, J.R. Richardson, who in 1907 was director of the Pierron Automobile Factory in Great Britain. MASS was an abbreviation for the name of his distributor, Mr Masser Horniman, the brains behind the company. These are the Masses sold in France which carry the Pierron name.
Louis Pierron was an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique, and his cars were generally powered by a Ballot engine like that presented. The gearbox is marked with the name Pierron on one side and Mass on the other. They were built in series and their most interesting peculiarity was being equipped with removable wheels locked with a central hub that can be screwed and unscrewed using a special key. Other quite modern solutions for the time were studied with the collaboration of Mr Poulet, also an engineer, and the car was sold with a six month guarantee!
The Mass-Pierron cars were powered by engines produced by Ballot, a company with an excellent reputation that was often used by Hispano Suiza. It was founded in 1905 by the brothers Edouard and Maurice Ballot, Boulevard Brune in Paris. In the beginning, it specialized in the manufacture of marine engines, from which comes the sign of a ship's anchor that can be found on the intake pipe of the car presented. A large number of French constructors used this engine, including Delage and Barré.
