Faster, page 13
Journalist Georges Fraichard accused René of never having been the same since his accident at Comminges and puzzled as to whether this was because of misfortune or a lack of nerve. When René was honest with himself, he had to admit that he was missing some of his previous fire, that he was too careful. No doubt burying the charred body of his friend Stanisław Czaykowski had only further sown his fears.
René was so fed up at his string of poor finishes—and criticism—that he showed up to the starting grid of the Vichy Grand Prix still hung-over from the night before. Maurice berated him for competing in such a state, and René finished a dismal fourth.
At the Swiss Grand Prix in late August, René was focused on proving to himself—and his sport—that he still deserved to be ranked among the best. Le Patron had not planned on entering the inaugural Swiss Grand Prix, but René had convinced him, and he was the only member of the team to make the journey to Berne. “We would like René Dreyfus to be our favorite,” L’Auto commented. “Alas, he alone will be fighting for our colors against the Italian and Germans . . . We do not think he can win in such conditions.”
Every inch of the cobblestoned city of Berne seemed to be decked out for the event. Cake-shop windows were filled with race-themed confections, and the official poster, which featured a silver-and-red car in an impressionist swoosh before stark blue mountains, could be seen on every wall. Flags from Germany, Italy, England, and France flew from the flagpoles in front of the Bellevue Hotel, a grand nineteenth-century palace with views of the Swiss Alps.
Although everyone was staying in the same hotel, as usual—in this case, the Bellevue—René found that the other drivers rarely ventured away from their teams. The Germans stayed to themselves. The Italians and French likewise. There was no intermingling.
Practice days were the same. The Silver Arrow cars were cordoned off by rope and draped with thick cloth to avoid prying eyes. Photographers were shooed away whenever an engine hood was opened. Mechanics made sure to say nothing that might remotely give away any advantage. The German teams, especially Mercedes, brought a small army with them to the pits. Every advantage, even a half second in refuel stops or tire changes, was sought in their efforts to win—not only for the Reich but also for the government bonuses they would earn with each top finish.
On August 26—race day—a threatening fervor took over the stands facing the 4.5-mile course that threaded through the Bremgarten forest outside the city. As had happened at the German Grand Prix, thousands wearing swastika armbands were present, and they shouted down all others.
Hans Stuck leaped into an early lead. Pushing hard, especially in the corners, René fought his way past Nuvolari and Chiron to take second position, but he could not close on Stuck’s P-Wagen. Five laps from the finish, an overheated engine forced him to pull into the pits, and by the time he returned to the track, another Auto Union driver, August Momberger, had managed to pass him.
René placed third, but in the confusion over his pit stop, the pro-French, pro-Bugatti part of the crowd thought that he had claimed second. Over the loudspeakers, the announcer stated the correct finish order. “No, Dreyfus was second,” yelled his fan base. Furious at the perceived slight to Momberger, the pro-German fans went wild. Fights broke out in the grandstands. To quiet the violence, the race organizers asked René to come to the microphone to confirm that he had indeed finished third. The whole experience left him depressed. His sport had become lost in the widening chasm between countries. Races were increasingly a battleground between nations rather than individual drivers, and the Nazis were clearly investing to dominate.
After the race, Louis Chiron hinted to René that Enzo Ferrari might like him on his team the following year. A few days later, René sat down with Meo Costantini to discuss his future with Bugatti. Costantini did not try to convince him to stay. Le Patron respected René as a driver—and liked him personally—but it was time to part company.
The Bugatti team manager had some advice. He looked down at his big calloused hands, one of the few vestiges of his time as a champion driver, and spoke in his usual subdued, yet pointed, manner: “René, you could be one of the greatest drivers in the world were it not for the one thing: You are not aggressive enough. You are too steady, too dependable.” His early success had come to him easily, Costantini continued, and he urged René to find something to struggle and fight for. Until that moment, greatness would elude him. The criticism cut deep, but René knew that Costantini was right.
René departed Molsheim with a watch made by Le Patron, an offer to join Scuderia Ferrari, and an announcement in the social pages that he and Chou-Chou were engaged to be married.
Two weeks before their December 8 wedding, René traveled to Châtel-Guyon to spend time with her family. They lived in the center of town in a grand villa named “La Paradou,” which could easily have been mistaken for a castle with its twin steepled turrets. Chou-Chou and her father had two matters they wanted to discuss with René. First, Gilbert Miraton proposed that René consider retiring from motorsport to join his pharmaceutical firm. There were piles of money to be made—and much less risk. Perhaps in the future, René said. He wanted to continue to compete. The request had come as no surprise. Their second was. They asked that he become Catholic.
The request stung, but, on consideration, René agreed. He wanted to make Chou-Chou happy, and he knew that racing was his true religion. He refused any other definition.
Prenuptial agreements settled, the wedding preparations continued, and René traveled to Paris to buy some gifts for his fiancée. While he was away, Gilbert Miraton died suddenly, of a heart attack. He was alone at his dining-room table when he succumbed, cigarette in hand.
René rushed back to Châtel-Guyon. He and Chou-Chou decided to proceed with their wedding as scheduled, a few days after the funeral. Guests were limited to immediate family. René wore his black funeral suit; Chou-Chou, in a black dress, cried through the ceremony. They canceled the honeymoon to be with the Miraton family. It was an ill omen for their future together—at a time when the world was full of ill omens, particularly for those whose identity was cemented by the family into which they were born, whether they chose it or not.
6
The Shadow
IN MAY 1935, on a ferry to Tripoli, Libya, several drivers gathered in the bar, sharing memories and laughs. René Dreyfus was there with Tazio Nuvolari and Louis Chiron, his new Scuderia Ferrari teammates. Manfred von Brauchitsch and Luigi Fagioli from Mercedes stood across from their chief rivals of the new season, Auto Union’s Hans Stuck and new team member Achille Varzi. For a brief moment, they enjoyed the camaraderie of years past.
Preferring to be alone, Rudi Caracciola snuck away. It was a starless night, and sheets of rain swept across the deck. He lingered on the aft deck beside the W25s, which were draped with gray tarpaulins. Smoking a cigarette, he thought of Charly. He had spent the winter away from Arosa, memories of her too strong in the home they had shared. He passed part of his time in the United States, where he attended the Indianapolis 500; he also lingered in Paris with Louis and Baby. By the railing, he watched the twin rivers of foam-churned sea created by the propellers. He could hear the revelry faintly from the bar and wondered who among them might die in their upcoming Grand Prix race—and what was the point of it all.
In December 1934, Berlin made clear what it felt his purpose was. From a podium in Joseph Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda, Adolf Hühnlein celebrated German success in the first season of the new formula. To the crowd of drivers and Nazi officials, he declared, “Racing is and always will be the highest embodiment of motorsport and thus the highest achievement of the nation in any international competition.”
Not to be outdone, other industry leaders stressed the importance of their work. The head of the national automobile club stated that the prowess of the Silver Arrows was “the benchmark for the industrial ability of a whole people.” An Auto Union executive was also unequivocal, describing the engineers and workmen who had built the P-Wagen as “a community of prodigious men of German blood and soil who with tenacious will, a fierce heart, and boundless energy, labor for the kingdom of Hitler, marching proudly at its head.”
These same men, Rudi knew, were moving lockstep together in the massive rearmament of Germany. In March 1935, Hitler announced to the world what most already knew: he would no longer abide by the military restrictions set out in the Versailles Treaty. He would reestablish conscription, aiming for a 500,000-strong army, and move toward the full-scale development of Germany’s air force and navy. All this came at a time of ever-increasing violence within Germany.
Rudi and his fellow Mercedes drivers were certainly all aware of the atrocities committed against the “enemies of the Reich,” including Jewish people, but such thoughts were usually shunted to one side. Brauchitsch recounted in his autobiography how uncomfortable he felt walking past Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, knowing the rumors of the horrors committed inside. “Weren’t they all communists out to destroy Germany?” he had tried to convince himself, and surely all the reports of hangings and shootings were exaggerated. Nevertheless, he decided it was best to avoid that street and in future chose to go another way. “It’s none of my business,” Brauchitsch wrote, with unsettling honesty. As a famous race car driver, “life was beautiful”—best not to disturb it. Rudi made the same Faustian bargain.
Rudi remained on the deck for hours it seemed, a chill curling around his spine as he thought of the risk they were taking every time they started their engines. All he knew was that he had no choice but to race, no choice but to sacrifice everything to win, and his only fear was that his body was too weak to compete against a new generation of competitors in ever faster and more powerful cars.
When they docked in Tripoli, the air was vibrating with the heat, and a cloud of red dust cast a pall over the whole city. Horse-drawn carriages took them through the narrow streets, lined with white houses and bustling with people, to the Uaddan Hotel & Casino. The star-shaped Uaddan, with its lavish gardens and fountains, was an exotic paradise compared to the staid hotels of continental Europe.
A protectorate of Italy—or its “fourth shore”—Libya was overseen by Governor Italo Balbo, a former Italian air marshal. Balbo has been described both as a “political Fascist thug” and a “hero who flew solo across the Atlantic.” He loved racing, and under his theatrical touch and Mussolini’s favor, the Tripoli Grand Prix became one of the richest, most extravagantly celebrated races.
The course’s huge cantilevered grandstand was a showstopper in its own right, and the 8.14-mile circuit outside the city wound across salt fields, alongside the Mediterranean, past a sparkling blue lake, and around sand dunes and palm groves. A roughly shaped quadrilateral, the course allowed drivers to push flat out along the long, gentle bends. This made it very dangerous if anyone misjudged the sideways slide of their wheels toward the outer edge of the road that was inherent in turns generally taken at speeds upwards of 140 mph. Noting that this type of controlled drift required “a fine sense of balance and touch and most discriminate use of the throttle, not to mention split-second timing and a very cool head,” George Monkhouse, a motorsport writer of the time, added that only a few drivers were capable of executing the maneuver.
From the very start, the 1935 race lived up to its billing as the “fastest road circuit in the world.” The course, subject to the desert heat, shredded the cars’ tires into angel-hair threads of rubber and caused the leaderboard to change continually as drivers were forced into the pits. First Fagioli. Then Caracciola. Varzi. Stuck.
The French and Italian factory teams were largely left behind by the Silver Arrows, which maintained average lap speeds of 120 mph. Rudi suffered three tire failures, but the Mercedes crews had reduced the average time of their pit stops, including refueling stops, from over two minutes to forty seconds—and often less. It was a military-style operation, with every move planned, coordinated, and drilled a thousand times.
Speed magazine compared their disciplined efficiency to “Kaiser Wilhelm’s army of 1914.” When a Mercedes driver needed to come into the pits, Neubauer waved a white flag emblazoned with a red cross. The driver killed his engine 120 yards away to keep the spark plugs from mucking up with oil. Momentum carried the silent W25 into the pits, where the driver braked on an exact mark. Any deviation from the line—an inch forward or back—cost precious seconds because the tire jacks, pressurized fuel hoses, spare tires, and starters were all prepositioned.
Then three mechanics, dressed in spotless white jumpers, launched into action. Neubauer had designated the tasks for each of them. “No. 1 gets the left rear wheel ready while No. 3 hands the driver clean goggles, a piece of chamois to clean the windscreen and a glass of water. Then he puts in the fuel. In the meantime, Mechanics No. 1 and 2 have jacked up the car and changed the rear wheels. Mechanic No. 1 has the electric start ready and the engine roars into life.”
Throughout, Neubauer stood beside his driver, giving him information about the state of the race liberally mixed with praise for his elegant driving, while he also made sure that his crew filled the tank to the line and secured the new wheels with the requisite number of blows with a copper hammer.
The swiftness of the operation gave Mercedes a huge advantage over the competition—it was, as Rudi called it, “the secret of victory.” Helping as well was the fact that scores of their engineers and mechanics had worked throughout the past winter to improve the power and reliability of the W25.
With five laps remaining, Varzi was leading for Auto Union, with Rudi a couple of minutes behind him in second position. Rudi knew the Italian had pushed too hard, too fast. Rudi just needed to bide his time. Two laps later, the heat vicious on their tires, Varzi threw a tread and pulled in for an emergency pit stop. By the time he returned to the track, Rudi had caught up to within a few car lengths. He patiently remained tethered there until he saw his opportunity, then sped away into the lead.
Nobody was even close as Rudi shot down the ocean side to the finish. He killed the engine and lifted his goggles from his face. Neubauer tap-danced across the pavement, then pulled Rudi free of the W25. A pair of mechanics lifted him onto their shoulders. Everyone wanted to slap him on the back or shake his hand.
He had won.
“There was the sun, the people . . . everything was good and bright and friendly, and I was back,” Rudi later wrote. “Yes, that was the greatest marvel. I was back, and I could fight again as well as all the rest . . . the shadow was gone.”
Reproducing the Daimler-Benz press releases almost to the letter, German newspapers headlined the victory. Their cars showed “absolute superiority” on “one of the world’s toughest tracks” to “flawlessly beat” all challengers. As for “veteran” Rudi, “he has recovered and is in great shape,” winning “with unbelievable bravery and perseverance” as well as “tactical precision.”
A month later, in mid-June, Rudi returned to the Nürburgring for the Eifel race. Three laps from the finish, Bernd Rosemeyer from Auto Union took the lead from Rudi, right in front of the grandstands. A former motorcycle racer, the new driver on the scene was twenty-five years old, tall, blond, and handsome. With a smile that could be measured in watts, he was also cocksure, daring, and a natural behind the wheel.
This was Rosemeyer’s first season at Auto Union, and only his second race as a Grand Prix driver, but he was already besting the field on a notoriously challenging course in a car that was even more notoriously difficult to handle, particularly in corners where the weight of its rear engine often led to tailspins.
Rudi stuck close to him, studying his every move. Finally he spotted a weakness in his young rival’s management of the course. Near the end of the circuit, Rosemeyer always prematurely shifted into fifth gear while coming out of a swallowtail-shaped turn. In the final lap, Rudi remained in fourth gear a spell longer, then stamped on his accelerator. As they exited the turn, Rosemeyer tried to block him out, but it was no use. Fist raised, Rudi crossed the finish first.
In the pits he stood on the seat of his car, head and shoulders above the crowd that pressed around him. A sea of arms whipped upward in Sieg Heil salutes to the winner. As was expected of him, Rudi followed with his own salute, and his victory became a celebration of the Third Reich—no matter that he considered the victory his, and his alone.
At the postrace party in the Eifelerhof Hotel, Rudi watched everyone congratulate the rookie driver on his “arrival.” Rosemeyer was exactly the kind of up-and-comer Rudi feared. To get in his head, the veteran champion pulled the swirl stick from his cocktail and approached Rosemeyer at his table. “Well done, my dear boy, but in the future don’t be content to just drive around the circuit. Use your head.” Rudi handed him the swirl stick. “With this, you can practice changing gears.” Rosemeyer was stone-faced, and a bitter feud was born.
It was a darker, more ruthless Rudi who had returned to the heights of the racing world. He was more vainglorious as well. At the time, one journalist quipped that everyone needed a ladder to speak to the German champion.
