Faster, page 14
Throughout the summer of 1935, René and Chou-Chou Dreyfus were on the road every week, most often in their gray Alfa Romeo cabriolet. René’s wife now took on the role of timekeeper, tutored in the trade by Baby Hoffmann. The two had become fast friends, especially since Baby accompanied René’s teammate Louis Chiron everywhere they went. The four made for a tight-knit band, displacing the one that Louis and Baby had shared with the Caracciolas before the 1933 Monaco accident, and then Charly’s death.
The meteoric rise of the Silver Arrows had left them few victories to celebrate over their dinners together on the circuit. Not even their Scuderia Ferrari teammate “Il Maestro” Nuvolari posed much of a challenge to Mercedes and Auto Union. At Monaco, René was unable to catch Luigi Fagioli in his W25. After the race, the “Abruzzi robber” tossed the winner’s bouquet of yellow roses over his shoulder like he could not be bothered with such trifles given how often they came.
Forced to be content with second place, René naively told reporters that he was hopeful for the future. At AVUS, the silver squadrons swept one-two-three, with Rudi winning again.
At the French Grand Prix, the ACF organizers added some chicanes to the Montlhéry road course to slow speeds down and give some advantage to skill over engine power. Rudi won again. Brauchitsch came in second. Due to mechanical trouble, neither Alfa P3 made it past the halfway point of the race.
For the French, it was another debacle. Not a single French make and not a single French driver even finished the race. Afterward, a newspaper cartoon depicted Mercedes mechanics performing cartwheels in the pits while a profile of Rudi Caracciola overlooked a graveyard of French cars. Charles Faroux declared the result “the great misery of French automobile construction.” L’Intransigent’s Georges Fraichard wrote about the “painful lessons” of the German victory: “When will it be understood in France that it is high time to react?” he asked.
MERCEDES-BENZ CLASSIC ARCHIVES
Rudi wins the 1935 French Grand Prix
The ACF took the coward’s path, announcing its intention to run the 1936 French Grand Prix in name only. To avoid French cars being roundly beaten again, they would not allow formula models like the Silver Arrows. Instead, the event would be sports cars only. Entrants were forbidden to use superchargers and needed to be two-seaters and fitted with fenders, windscreens, horns, rearview mirrors, and a complete electric system including lights and a self-starter.
At the Belgian Grand Prix, run at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit at the edge of the Ardennes, René found himself battling against the Germans again. Try as he did to cut their lead in the turns, he could never get in front of them. Their acceleration was unmatchable. After the race, it was Rudi on top of the victory stand again, enjoying an annus mirabilis after his long recovery.
René spent so much time at the Silver Arrows’ heels that day that he grew sick from the noxious exhaust fumes. Comparing their WW fuel to chloroform, he had to bow out at the thirty-first lap. Once in the pits, he stretched out on the pavement to gather himself. Later, eyes still burning, he bathed his face in milk and drank a glass of the same to soothe his throat. His failed effort to beat the field of German cars was not so easily cleared away.
Even with new suspension and modified engines, the P3s remained outclassed. It was only at those races that the Germans declined to attend, notably at Pau, Marne, and Dieppe, that Scuderia Ferrari had a shot. Nuvolari won at Pau, and René in the other two in tight finishes against Louis.
Between races, René and Chou-Chou stayed in northern Italy at Modena, near the small thirty-man shop that Enzo Ferrari operated from his provincial hometown. Ferrari rarely attended races, so René and the other drivers personally reported back to him on how the cars had run. Thirty-seven years old, almost six feet tall, with a formidable Roman nose, and a thick pompadour of black hair, Ferrari made an august presence. Such was his force that he rarely needed more than a soft, almost silken tone of voice to command attention.
A former Alfa Romeo driver, then one of its dealership owners, Ferrari had launched his own racing team with the Italian cars in November 1929, inspired by the Maserati brothers. He persuaded Giuseppe Campari and Tazio Nuvolari to become his first drivers. Within four years, the Scuderia Ferrari essentially took over the official Alfa Romeo factory team. Ferrari’s shop, now in a two-story stone building at number 11, Viale Trento e Trieste, in Modena, brought the cars in from the factory in Milan and readied them for racing.
The new formula, and the advance of the Silver Arrows, toppled the Alfa Romeo P3 from its earlier dominance—and Scuderia Ferrari stumbled with it. Varzi left the team shortly before the 1935 season to join Auto Union, taking the spot Nuvolari wanted. The rivalry between the two was legendary. They first competed against each other as motorcycle racers. Nuvolari was raised on a farm in rural Mantua; Varzi grew up in wealthy circles in Milan. While Nuvolari was all emotion on the track, Varzi was a cold, calculating, and pitiless driver who exploited any weakness. The two could not stand to be on the same team, and Mussolini intervened to ensure that “Il Maestro” would represent Italy in an Alfa Romeo.
Such machinations were beyond René, but he was glad to be on the Scuderia. First, he and Louis Chiron were teammates. Second, he greatly admired and liked Nuvolari, who, at forty-three, had lost none of his reflexes or his will to race. Asked by a reporter when he would retire, Nuvolari answered, “You, sir, will already be long dead before I do.”
There was much to learn from him both on and off the track. Meo Costantini had told René that he lacked aggressiveness; in that arena, Nuvolari was the foremost professor. Away from races, René found him modest and reserved. Besides the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips, he maintained a meatless diet, slept twelve hours a day, and rarely drank alcohol—and if so, only wine. Married with two sons, he was also a devoted family man.
Five feet, five inches tall, Nuvolari was reed-thin, with sinewy muscles drawn so tightly over his bones that he could have served as an object lesson in the anatomy of movement. Under his cropped black and gray hair, he had the kind of face that haunted his competitors: deep hooded eyes, a wide, long-toothed smile, a granite chin, and the inability to mask any emotion. Not that he ever tried. Nuvolari was completely without artifice.
He also lacked a sense of caution, a fact that often saw him competing in a plaster cast from his latest accident. During his races, he screamed, beat the sides of his car, and rocked about the cockpit like he could will the machine to go faster. Using his innate sense of balance and dexterity, he slewed around corners at unparalleled speeds, virtually inventing the four-wheel drift. “He drove like a madman, crashing often, flogging his cars as if they were beasts of burden,” one historian wrote. “He was, in the argot of the day, the classic garibaldino—a driver with the slashing, all-out style of a winner; a charger who drove with such abandon that rumors spread through the crowds that he was haunted by a death wish or, like Paganini, had a pact with the Devil.”
At the German Grand Prix on July 28, René, who was incapacitated with the flu, witnessed a master class from “The Flying Mantuan” in the kind of undaunted will that it took to win. Wearing his trademark lemon-yellow, sleeveless jersey, blue pants bound at the ankle, and a tricolor scarf tied around his neck, Nuvolari climbed into his car. His lucky charm—a gold tortoiseshell—hung from a chain tucked into his shirt. Rather than a potential menace, he looked almost a dandy.
When the lights blinked from red to yellow to green, that quickly changed. The Italian champion surged ahead on the rain-slicked Nürburgring course, forcing his P3 into the block of silver cars going down the initial straight. He cut the first corner like a scarlet scythe while the others veered wide. Shouting “Corri! [Come on!],” he shifted into third gear and accelerated. After the first lap, he was in second place, twelve seconds behind Rudi Caracciola.
Round and round The Ring, he continued his battle against Mercedes and Auto Union, their only challenger among the field of twenty. The sun came out, and the road dried. To counter the Silver Arrows’ superior speed, Nuvolari nearly lived up to the legend that he never used his brakes.
Time and again, he beat them out of the blind turns only to find them closing fast on him in his side-view mirror once they were into the straights again. Up and down the ribbon of road through the pine-clad valley, Nuvolari fought, feeling like a matador against a herd of bulls.
At the midpoint, he burst ahead into the lead, but then he needed to pull into the pits. Rosemeyer, Brauchitsch, and Caracciola followed in behind him as well. With the leading four cars in the pits, the crowd anxiously waited to see who would come out first. Forty-seven seconds later, Brauchitsch returned to the circuit. Rosemeyer and Caracciola left half a minute later. Nuvolari remained.
In their excitement, the Ferrari pit crew broke the fuel pump, and they needed to pour gasoline into the tank from canisters instead. Bouncing on his feet beside his car, gesticulating wildly, cursing and scowling, Nuvolari urged them to go faster. Finally, two minutes and fourteen seconds later, he returned to the track, now in sixth position and far back.
He cut across grass berms on sharp corners and brushed straw-bale barriers to gain precious seconds. He drifted and side-slipped in the many turns, rarely tamping on his brakes. Italian journalist Giovanni Lurani described his driving as “inspired, fearless, untouchable.” With three laps remaining, Nuvolari was in second, but Brauchitsch was almost a minute ahead—an insuperable gap most believed. Nuvolari chiseled eleven seconds off in the twentieth lap but only four seconds in the next. However, such was his “remorseless dance of death,” as Lurani wrote, that Brauchitsch decided to forgo a desperately needed tire change. Nuvolari thrashed his Alfa about the course, closing . . . ever closing.
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“The Flying Mantuan,” Tazio Nuvolari, at the German Grand Prix 1935, urging his pit crew to go faster!
The loudspeakers positioned around the course recorded the action. At the horse-shaped Karussell turn: “Brauchitsch is being closely followed by Nuvolari.” Six miles from the finish, the imperious German driver threw a tire tread. Nuvolari dashed into the lead, and the announcement “Nuvolari has passed him!” stunned silent the roughly 400,000 German spectators. Minutes later, he took the checkered flag.
From his perch atop the timekeepers’ stand, Korpsführer Hühnlein crumpled into a ball his prepared speech heralding another Nazi win. Such was their confidence in a German victory that the Nürburgring staff struggled to find an Italian flag to raise over the victory podium. The German newspapers chalked up the defeat to “bad luck,” but everybody knew the truth. As one British editorialist wrote, Nuvolari had demonstrated “once again that the man, rather than the machine, was tempered for victory.”
The crucial lesson was not lost on René, who was desperate to compete at the level he had before. Also, he had seen enough of the jingoistic show to have had his fill of it.
That fall, Lucy Schell steered her shiny new Delahaye through her hometown of Brunoy. Situated eighteen miles southeast of Paris on the former hunting grounds of French kings, the elegant town was surrounded by forests and rolling hills. For over two centuries, many of the capital’s richest families bought estates in the area, their mansions monuments to their success, their noble lineage, or both. A row of the grandest stood on the rue des Vallées, which bordered the River Yerres, and Lucy and her family lived in number 26: “La Rairie.”
Nobody was surprised to see Lucy driving a new car—nor were they surprised that she was driving it fast. But the two-seater convertible roadster that the residents of Brunoy saw that day was quite surprising. Straight from the Delahaye factory, it was the first of its kind: the 135.
Under the curved lines of its coachwork, designed by Joseph Figoni, the same carrossier who built the aerodynamic shell of the Montlhéry record-breaker, was a tiger of an engine. Jean François had further developed the design that catapulted Lucy to several wins over the past eighteen months and to third place in the 1935 Monte Carlo Rally. At 3.5 liters, the new engine was just as sturdy as its predecessor but threw out a lot more horsepower. Importantly, François had fitted it on an altered chassis, one with a longer wheelbase that stood closer to the ground. He had also improved its suspension.
Before François finished building the 135, Lucy visited Weiffenbach at his office to order a dozen for herself and friends. “There you are, Monsieur Charles. My order will cover the cost of the pair you want to run yourself. Now will you please ask François to do what he can for us?” As a mark of gratitude, Weiffenbach made sure that the very first 135 completed was delivered to Lucy Schell. Compared to some of the bone-shakers she had driven in her career, the Delahaye was a balanced and smooth ride, both in straights and in corners.
Lucy cruised through the arched entrance of La Rairie. Every detail of the three-story Belle Époque villa, from the intricate wrought-iron gate to the garden scenes in the stained-glass windows to the boathouse that looked to be carved inside a living tree, spoke to the wealth of its owners. After marrying, Lucy and Laury had purchased the house from a successful entrepreneur and made it their own, building a huge garage for their numerous cars. Their boys, Harry and Phillipe, now rambunctious teenagers, were raised there. They knew the inside of an engine better than most experienced mechanics.
As well as preparing for the 1936 Monte Carlo Rally, Lucy was already seeding plans to form a racing team to run her Delahayes. With her family money, she had the finances. Weiffenbach was finally proving to be a reliable supporter, and after years of organizing her own participation at events, she certainly had the experience to lead her own team. Wanting to chart her own course was an ambition she never lacked. Other drivers had done it over the years—Louis Chiron for one. So could she.
“Put Nuvolari in the car!” the Monza grandstands howled as Tazio Nuvolari returned on foot to the pits. Over halfway through the Italian Grand Prix on September 8, 1935, his Alfa had broken down while dueling Auto Union for first position. His countrymen were baying for him to be allowed to take over the other Alfa in the race, the one René was piloting, now in second place.
Two laps later, when René steered into the pits to refuel, Ferrari asked him to relinquish his car to Nuvolari. It was not a question, and given that Nuvolari was also the team captain, René did not hesitate to stand aside. The Italian crowd demanded that one of their own have a shot at the win, even though René had driven a marvelous race before being pulled, and many thought he could have won.
After finishing second, behind Auto Union’s Hans Stuck, Nuvolari generously gave René his share of the prize money, but the race was yet another sign of how much nationalism had infected the Grand Prix. René felt that no matter how well he placed in a race, the Italian fans did not seem to be behind him. They wanted an Italian winning in an Italian car.
Worse were the sneers and openly anti-Semitic remarks he received at Monza from the crowds. The Fascists, both in Italy and in Germany, had opened the floodgates on such racial hatred.
A week after the race, Hitler announced the codification into law of such hatred during his annual Nuremberg rally. Already that year, the tide of anti-Jewish fervor had hit a high-water mark with beatings, arrests, and segregation becoming pervasive. Signs posted outside restaurants and other public places warned JEWS NOT WANTED. At Nuremberg, Hitler mandated two new policies: the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped Jews of citizenship rights, including the right to vote; and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which forbade marriages and sexual relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.
To top off the rally, 100,000 soldiers, an armada of planes and bombers, and numerous mechanized units, including ones with heavy artillery guns, staged a war-games show. The demonstration came at a time when Hitler was flexing his muscles on the international stage, annexing the industrial Saar territory bordering France, and securing his borders to the east.
On October 3, Mussolini further threatened peace in Europe by invading Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) on the Horn of Africa. The toothless response by the League of Nations signaled that Fascist aggression might go unchecked, and half-hearted protests by France and Britain only pushed Mussolini closer to Germany. The conflict ruptured any pretense that the Grand Prix was immune from such troubles. “Politics are normally beyond the scope of this journal,” the editors of Motorsport wrote. “But not when the sport of motor-racing is threatened. We cannot be accused of concerning ourselves with trifles, for [ours] is essentially a peacetime sport, and we presume that peace is what most people want.”
Mussolini’s invasion coincided with the end of the season. With several wins and top finishes in the seven Grandes Épreuves of the season, Rudi was named overall European champion. His Mercedes teammates Fagioli and Brauchitsch followed in second and third in overall points. Nuvolari was fourth. René finished fifth, with a pair of wins as well as a healthy sequence of second-, third-, and fourth-place results. As he told reporters, Tazio was an inspiration, particularly his “continual agitation” to lead every race, no matter his deficit in the field or the risk he needed to endure. In terms of prize money, René was first in class on the team.
The annual shuffle of drivers started soon after. René felt confident that he would be invited to return to the Scuderia the following season, and Ferrari confirmed that he wanted him back. René and Chou-Chou looked for an apartment to buy in Modena. Swiftly, political winds made his return impossible.
Mussolini demanded an all-Italian team, and sentiment in the country was against having a French driver in the red colors, let alone one of Jewish origin with the surname Dreyfus. It did not matter whether René practiced the Jewish faith, or any other. As his brother Maurice, who converted to Catholicism as well, but more out of an earnest alignment with its beliefs, was told by an anti-Semite, “Your name is Dreyfus; therefore you are a Jew.”
