Faster, page 11
The prototype Mercedes engine, a supercharged 3.3-liter straight-eight, which Rudi saw mounted on a dynamometer, was an absolute thoroughbred. Although not a revolutionary design, it benefited from ultraprecise construction and a host of improvements, allowing for horsepower measurements 50 percent greater than the Alfa P3.
Nibel matched the engine with a refined platform built of light alloys wherever possible. The W25 was a single-seater—new territory for Mercedes, as was its use of hydraulic brakes. It featured front- and rear-wheel independent suspension. They also advanced design by combining the gearbox and differential (which provided power from the crankshaft to the rear wheels) into a single unit. This provided better weight distribution and allowed the driver to sit lower in the cockpit. The W25 promised to ride balanced and tight to the ground. If everything was tuned correctly, it would be the fastest race car to ever grace the Grand Prix.
Motivated more than ever to recover, Rudi moved back to Arosa. During the bright winter days, he bathed his leg in sunshine. In the evenings, he ambled out for a walk with Charly, venturing farther each time. He accepted that he would never again move without pain. The real question was his ability to endure a 500-mile race in the tight W25 cockpit.
On February 2, Charly headed off for a day’s skiing with some friends. She was reluctant to go, but Rudi convinced her that she deserved at least a day’s vacation after ten months of nursing him. Later that afternoon, he hobbled down the snowbound hill to meet her at the train station. Neither she nor any of her ski companions showed up at the appointed hour. He returned home.
The sun set, and there continued to be no sign of Charly. Rudi sat in the chalet, the lights out, the better to see her coming up the road. At 10:00 p.m., the guide who had led her tour approached the door. One look at him and Rudi went white. Words followed: There had been an avalanche . . . Charly must have seen it; instead of dodging its approach, she looked to lean into its advance . . . her friends believed she might have had a heart attack; she was known to have a weak one, didn’t he know? . . . Charly was dead.
Without her and without racing, there was nothing left in his life.
5
The One Thing
AT THE DELAHAYE factory, hammers pealed, machine tools grumbled, compressed air hissed. The smell of ground metal, oil, grease, lacquer, and the heavy effort of a team of men permeated the air. Past them strode Lucy Schell, once again headed toward the office of Charles Weiffenbach. She was incensed. Not only had his company missed the delivery date of her Delahaye Type 134, preventing her from competing in the Monte Carlo Rally in January 1934, but he had then supplied the very model she proposed be built for his factory driver, Albert Perrot, to participate in the Rally himself. Perrot had placed a dismal 24th out of 114 participants.
It was an experiment only, Monsieur Charles said, trying to pacify her. Then he further stoked her anger by revealing that he was supplying a pair of that same “experiment,” 138 Specials, to two of her rivals in the all-female Saint-Raphaël Rally, Mademoiselle Gonnot and Madame Nenot.
The two women were longtime Delahaye customers, Monsieur Charles said. Surely she must understand.
Lucy did not, and to prove her point, she crushed the two 138 Specials in the Saint-Raphaël Rally, driving her rather less powerful Delahaye 134 to a fourth-place overall finish.
While Lucy fought her battle with Monsieur Charles, the daily newspaper headlines chronicled a France spiraling into chaos. The government was a shambles, with prime ministers and their cabinets rising and falling in months rather than the usual years. Shortly before Saint-Raphaël, a grab bag of right-wing forces clashed with police on the Place de la Concorde. Some believed that a Fascist putsch might be at hand. In crushing the protest, fifteen people were killed and hundreds injured. “It appears that France was failing to adjust her social and political system to meet the demands of the modern world,” remarked the New York Herald Tribune.
Insulated by her fortune, Lucy could focus on racing, but she worried about France—and its strength among nations. Although neither wholly French nor American, she had spent much of her adult life living in and around Paris. She had served there in World War I. Her sons had been born in France, and like her, they spoke the language with as much ease as English. Lucy believed that France must find its footing against an emboldened Fascist Germany, but it was even beyond her sturdy self-belief to think that she could have a role. Her energies were instead bent toward competing on an equal level with the men who dominated the sport she loved.
While women in America had already won the right to vote, they remained disenfranchised in France. The emancipated flapper, who wore her hair in a bob, skirt above the knee, and did as she liked, was largely a myth. Promiscuity was likened to prostitution, contraception was a rarity, and abortions were forbidden. Women were largely expected to produce children, keep house, and do as their husband or parents told them. Well-to-do women were certainly not expected to work for money, and any labor they did was to be performed as dames de charité (ladies of charity). In her life, every day, Lucy had to fight this model of what she ought to be.
In motorsport, Lucy was up against an even more male-dominated world, one that was riddled with sexism from its earliest days. One of its pioneers, Camille du Gast, was banned from certain events for “feminine excitability.” Organizers spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what these early female drivers should wear (lest, ridiculously, their skirts blow up over their heads), rather than how well they were competing. By the time Lucy first got involved in the sport, the concept of women racing cars—not to mention driving at all—had barely improved. According to La Vie Automobile, women were “weak and delicate by definition” and therefore ill suited to the “muscular efforts” needed to start a car, change the tires, brake, or steer. Another editorialist claimed that women cared little about an automobile’s power or handling abilities; they were “only attentive to the aesthetic factor.” Speed queens like Elisabeth Junek, who was a specialist of the Targa Florio, the Sicilian open-road endurance race that was one of the toughest in the world, revealed these claims to be ridiculous. But many races continued to forbid women outright. Others only allowed them as co-drivers. They were a rarity in Grand Prix events, and factory teams refused to let them join their ranks.
As for their fellow male race-car drivers, they seldom gave women the credit they deserved. One driver joked, “They chase after us on the track; we chase after them off it.” When passing female drivers in a race, Louis Chiron liked to blow them kisses. To buck this pervasive prejudice that she experienced in every room she entered—and in every competition she signed up for—Lucy had to be supremely competent and forceful in what she wanted.
After the Paris–Saint-Raphaël, Lucy visited rue du Banquier again. This time she was unequivocal. She wanted a 138 Special of her own for the Paris–Nice Rally so that she could prove herself to be the “best Delahaye rally driver in the land”—man or woman. Weiffenbach agreed, not least because he wanted to use her wins to advertise his new line of cars. There was another factor as well: he liked Lucy Schell. She was every bit as pertinacious, combative, and perservering as he considered himself to be.
On Saturday, March 24, Lucy arrived for the start of the Paris–Nice Rally. She and her five fellow speed queens (out of a total field of forty) posed arm in arm in front of their cars for photographers. Chapeau tilted on the side of her head, black fitted jacket zipped to her throat, and wearing heels, Lucy looked like she had just stepped off the Champs-Élysées after shopping for the latest spring fashions. She then changed into her racing overalls.
The Paris–Nice Rally had the qualities of a decathlon compared to the knockdown, dragged-out marathon of the Monte Carlo Rally. First run in 1922, it served to spotlight, over a number of events, the speed, stamina, flexibility, braking, road-handling, and acceleration abilities of the entrant cars—and their drivers’ ability to show them at their best.
Lucy took off on the first stage through a morning fog. The sky cleared a half hour later, and she kept a steady pace south toward Marseille, 750 kilometers away. There were some spells of rain en route, but Lucy finished well within the allotted time as dusk settled over the southern port city.
The next day she ranked third best in the kilometer-acceleration test up the hill of Marseille’s Boulevard Michelet. On the Monday, she ran the 200 kilometers to Nice, again right on schedule. In the afternoon, and the next day, she was eighth in the 500-meter flying-start contest and performed well in the braking and steering tests.
For the final stage of the Paris–Nice Rally, the La Turbie hill climb, Lucy barreled away from the start, uncowed by the first sharp turn where an etched stone marker reminded all drivers of the nature of the race. There, on April 1, 1903, Count Eliot Zborowski, a glamorous pioneer of racing, snagged his cuff link on the hand throttle and, unable to slow, failed to make the turn. His Mercedes slammed into the rough-hewn wall. Such was the impact of his flying body against the stone, one account stated, that “his head vanished into his chest cavity.”
After the turn that claimed Zborowski, Lucy sped up one of the steepest sections of the course. Bordered by sunflower-colored villas and palm trees, the road headed north, away from the coast, in a series of soft S-bends and long straights that allowed her to push the 138 Special almost to its maximum. The climb steepened again as she headed east toward the finish across from Èze, a town perched like an eagle’s nest atop a peak between the Grande Corniche and the coastline. There was not an instant to enjoy the sweeping view as she swept onward. She finished the serpentine course with the tenth-best time, five minutes and 26.6 seconds.
René Dreyfus was a contestant in the hill race alone. He broke the course record with a time of three minutes and forty-five seconds, reclaiming his title as “The King of La Turbie” from Jean-Pierre Wimille. He won in a four-wheel-drive, 4.9-liter Bugatti, which one writer said had “the demeanor of a barroom fighter.”
At the Automobile Club de Nice the following night, the race’s organizers celebrated the winners. Lucy finished eighth in the overall ranking, first in her engine class, and first again among the female drivers, earning her the Coupe des Dames. Her “admirable virtuosity” as a driver was lauded equally with her “perfect” 138 Special. Standing together, she and René lifted their trophies at the front of the dining room.
The two barely knew each other except by reputation. They moved in the same motorsport circles but had never competed in the same race before. René knew more about her sons, who always seemed to be hanging out at the sides of racetracks or in the pits, their mother gaining them entrance where they would otherwise have been shooed away.
Between the two drivers, there was much to discuss with regard to the pitfalls of La Turbie and the challenges of a contest solely against the clock. No doubt Lucy regaled René about her 138 Delahaye, and he about the Bugatti, whose steering was so tough that he felt like his arms might have broken off midclimb. Neither knew then that they would one day work together to share the victor’s stage in a much greater arena: the Grand Prix. For now, Lucy was glad that she finally had her perfect Delahaye.
Six weeks later, on May 8, Jean François’s latest creation rolled onto the Montlhéry autodrome, the Delahaye name printed in block letters on its curved hood. The young engineer had essentially taken the 138 Special, souped up its 3.2-liter engine with high-performance pistons and other improvements, and had it bodied in a single-seater, aerodynamic aluminum shell that resembled the fuselage of a fighter plane, complete with bubble-roofed cockpit. The body, designed by the noted carrossier Joseph Figoni, was painted with the colors of the French tricolor: red, white, and blue. Monsieur Charles had ordered it to be built specifically to break a record and to garner headlines for the company.
A giant concrete bowl set on a lush hilltop on the road to Orléans, fifteen miles from Paris, Montlhéry was a favorite site for record attempts. Cars could race around the oval track day and night, the screaming of their engines insulated by the surrounding countryside. Constructed in 1924, the autodrome was financed by a French industrialist, Alexandre Lamblin, who also owned the popular L’Aero-Sports newspaper. When a road course was added a year later, Lamblin made sure the location went on to host the French Grand Prix.
It was on the autodrome alone that Delahaye intended to wrest the World 48 Hours Record from the current holder, Renault, whose drivers had managed, the previous month, a distance of 8,037 kilometers (4,993 miles, the rough equivalent of driving from Los Angeles, California, to Charleston, South Carolina, and back) during the allotted time, posting an average speed of 167 kph (104 mph). At 4:00 p.m., Perrot set off. François had secured a forty-gallon gas tank in the car’s truncated conical tail so that they would only have to stop every four hours to refuel and switch pilots. Marcel Dhôme and Armand Girod were lined up to take part in the attempt.
ADATTO ARCHIVES
The 1934 world-record breaker Delahaye 138
Twelve hours later, the car was smoothly circling the autodrome at an average of 183.7 kph and had covered a distance of 2,204 kilometers, breaking a national class record for that time period. The engine was running at an untaxing 3,800 rpm. Fifteen hours into the attempt, some bolts on the large fuel tank had loosened, causing a leak. François was untroubled. The drivers could rely on the auxiliary tank, though it would now require hourly pit stops. Soon enough, more national rec-ords in the 3,000–5,000 kilometer range fell to Delahaye. Then the World 24 Hours Records succumbed as well.
At lunchtime on May 10, the track car was continuing its inexorable march, round and round, records falling with easy regularity. Monsieur Charles and a host of Delahaye staff were celebrating the string of successes in La Potinière, the café behind the grandstand, when a company timekeeper threaded through the maze of round tables to reach them. Given the current pace, he told Weiffenbach, they had a shot at the 10,000-kilometer record as well. Go for it, was the response.
A weary, hood-eyed François watched his track car sail past at 4:00 p.m., the World 48 Hours Record theirs, covering 8,464 kilometers with an average speed of 176 kph, comfortably beating Renault. Past midnight, the trio of drivers finished the distance of 10,000 kilometers, breaking yet another world record. In sum, Delahaye claimed eleven national class records and four world records with its “son-of-a-truck” dynamo of endurance.
Jean François had clearly stepped out of the shadow of Amédée Varlet, the firm’s long-standing engineer. François had an unlikely background for an automobile savant. Raised in Revel, a French town noted for cabinetmaking, and educated at a university famous for producing Catholic theologians, he nonetheless led the design department at Beck Automotive in Lyon by his thirtieth birthday. His advanced prototypes failed to save that company from bankruptcy, but they provided him with a promising résumé for a job at Delahaye. When François arrived at the rue du Banquier in the unbodied chassis of his Beck design, Weiffenbach hired him immediately. Over the next decade, he largely played the dutiful assistant to the staid ideas of Varlet.
No more. The day after Delahaye’s record-breaking success, L’Auto featured his role and remarked that the “old French firm, whose construction has always been irreproachable, has returned to the sports field to enchant us.”
At a party to celebrate the achievement, also attended by Lucy Schell, at Delahaye’s Champs-Élysées dealership, old Georges Morane praised François and the three drivers. He then pointed to the record-breaking car, which was displayed on a raised platform. “They used to say that our cars weren’t fast. Today, this one is the fastest in the world.”
While the motorsport world advanced without him on every front, Rudi continued to strengthen his leg with daily bouts of physical therapy. In late May 1934, he was scheduled to drive the W25, and he could barely cross a room without dragging his stunted leg behind him.
After Charly’s funeral, Rudi holed up in his Swiss chalet, surrounded by the trinkets of his former victories. His grief left him helpless to care for himself. On frequent visits, Louis and Baby made sure that he ate and that he left the chalet once a day to go for a walk. He only went out after dusk, to avoid anybody seeing him stumbling forward on his cane. Often, when Louis was back in Paris, Baby stayed with Rudi alone. After almost withering away in this self-imposed prison, Rudi agreed to take up Louis’s offer to drive the lap of honor at the Monaco Grand Prix. The race was the all-important first competition of the new formula, albeit one without any German cars.
In early April, to the applause of thousands, he drove a Mercedes convertible around the course. At the halfway point, the pain in his right leg forced him to switch to his left foot to brake and accelerate. When he returned to the harbor, the starting grid was assembled, and the engines were revving. Standing beside his car, he moved his eyes across the field. There were Chiron, Nuvolari, Varzi, Dreyfus, and twelve others. He ached to be among them and left before the second lap was finished.
“For me, there had to be a comeback . . . Otherwise life was pointless,” he wrote of his thoughts when he had returned to Arosa. As a race car driver, “you are the will that controls this creature of steel; you think for it, you are in tune with its rhythm. And your brain works with the same speed and precision as this heart of steel. Or else the monster turns master over you and destroys you. I had to drive. There was nothing else for me.”
While Rudi prepared for his comeback, Hans Nibel sent Brauchitsch and another driver, Ernst Henne, to test the W25. Brauchitsch mangled the car on its first outing. Henne crashed as well. Some alterations to the differential gears that controlled the separate wheel speeds solved the problem. Subsequently, Brauchitsch and Luigi Fagioli blazed tremendous times.
At 6:00 a.m. on May 24, Rudi arrived at AVUS for his trial run in the W25. He asked for the dawn start in order to avoid the press. It would be his first time behind the wheel of a race car in over a year, and he feared he might falter.
