Faster, page 15
René met Ferrari at his Modena headquarters. Fumes from the machine shop hung in the air, and the screech of metal being milled made a terrible din.
There was not much to say. It was best he return to France to drive for a French team, Ferrari advised. René had no recourse but to accept this decision, much as he hated it. He and Chou-Chou packed up, sold the Alfa Romeo cabriolet, and left for Paris.
At the same time, René learned that Mercedes had signed Chiron, in part because of the recruitment efforts of Caracciola. This was a further blow to René. It was clear to everyone that his 1935 record was far superior to those of The Old Fox. Many conjectured that, given the right car, René could have been one of the top three drivers on the circuit. If anybody deserved a spot on the best team in Europe—apart from Nuvolari, who was again forced, against his wishes, by Mussolini’s government to remain with Ferrari—René did.
The implication was again obvious: René was Jewish, and a Jewish driver could not represent the Mercedes or Auto Union Silver Arrows. Hitler himself had to sign off on Chiron, a non-German, joining the team. Meanwhile, over at Auto Union, Stuck was almost removed from the team because he was married to tennis star Paula von Reznicek, whose grandfather was Jewish. Only Stuck’s close association with Hitler saved him from banishment. Adolf Rosenberger, the only prominent German Jewish driver, was not so fortunate, even though he had helped fund Porsche in the early development of the P-Wagen. Rosenberger was forbidden a license to compete, arrested by the SS for “racial disgrace” (code for having relations with an Aryan), and beaten in a concentration camp before he fled to America.
René had heard that Neubauer considered hiring him at one point. When it was pointed out to him that the French driver was the son of a Jew, Neubauer tartly responded, “They will decide who is Jewish.” “They,” meaning Hitler, sometimes overlooked a person’s heritage when it suited him, but the truth was he would never allow a “Dreyfus” to race under the Nazi banner.
That October, René attended the annual ACF dinner in the club’s glittering chandeliered hall overlooking the Place de la Concorde. Surrounded by the who’s who of international motor racing, including a delegation from the NSKK, René endured the medal presentation to Rudi Caracciola for his “splendid” French Grand Prix win and then long-winded speeches by one elderly, tuxedo-dressed ACF official after the next. One spoke about how the League of Nations would surely guarantee peace in Europe. Another praised the Germans for their “magnificent success,” avoiding any mention of their obvious government support. A third lamented the lack of a decent French car, particularly since Bugatti had said that it would probably not be competing the following year. “Are we going to resign ourselves to the decline of our colors?” the speaker asked. None spoke to how the ugly politics of Europe had cast some drivers adrift, while others benefited greatly. Seated together at the dinner, René and Rudi signaled that very divide.
To participate in the 1936 Grand Prix circuit, René knew he had few choices, if any, of teams to join. With the investments now being made to field competitive formula cars, running as an independent was impossible. He was a jockey without a horse.
With a jubilant shout of “Partez!” Lucy Schell launched down the palm-tree-lined road from Athens to Eleusis in her Delahaye 135. Behind her, the bleached ruins of the Acropolis, illuminated by moonlight, faded in the distance. Once out of the Greek capital, the route turned into a dirt trail that threaded past olive groves up into snow-covered mountains. Every now and then wild foxes appeared in the headlights before scattering into the darkness. It was January 25, 1936, and the Monte Carlo Rally had officially begun. Only 2,400 miles to go before Lucy and Laury reached Monaco. With their experience—and new car—they believed that victory might be theirs at last, and that Lucy would make her mark as the first female driver to win the rally.
The warm weather favored the eighteen competitors who departed from Athens. They crossed easily through several mountain passes that most years would have been deep in snow—one of the reasons why that particular route was often considered the rally’s most challenging. Near Larissa, the road cut through some marshes and low fields. Traces of the Great War remained visible: ragged trench lines scarred the land, and shell craters had left pockmarks on the terrain, which looked like a moonscape. Several times they forded streams that ran almost two feet deep.
Once into Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the roads deteriorated into muddy ruts. To reach the next control point at the scheduled hour, Lucy had to navigate around gullies and potholes big enough to swallow their car at speeds that would have made most tremble. Their Delahaye handled these perils and the constant shifting of gears with an anthropomorphic keenness, as if it was enjoying the test of its independent front suspension and the rigor of its engine. The tires stayed tight to the road around bends, and the car practically leaped forward on the straights, its almost noiseless six-cylinder engine begging to be allowed to run free at its maximum speed of 115 mph. The cable brakes were sturdy, and the steering was as precise as a surgeon’s blade.
When Autocar got its hands on the 135, later that year, it praised the car unreservedly: “The whole machine is responsive, almost alive, so exactly does the engine answer the driver’s ideas of what he wants to do in relation to other traffic and to the actual road conditions, so exactly do the controls perform the necessary operations.”
When the Schells reached Hungary, they tore down the well-kept roads toward Budapest. From there they ventured on to Vienna through a fog so thick they were unaware that night had fallen. Snow fell on the way to Salzburg, but the Delahaye kept to the road without chains.
Several days and almost a thousand miles later, they entered Monte Carlo on schedule.
That year the performance test involved a figure-of-eight course featuring two pylons that had to be rounded at flat-out speeds. The Schells posted a time of one minute, 5.4 seconds, trouncing those who had gone before. One after another of their fellow competitors failed to match their speeds, and it looked like they might have the rally in the bag when Romanian driver Petre Cristea shot around the course in his Ford V8 in one minute, five seconds flat. When his time was announced, the Schells blanched. Long-sought victory had been swept right out from under them.
They later learned that Cristea had practiced over four hundred times on a mocked-up course in Bucharest. He had also engineered his Ford to lock its wheels automatically when the steering wheel was rotated completely on either side. This facilitated his 180-degree turns at the pylons with a dexterity a journalist likened to a grasshopper’s jump. Cristea’s refinements stretched, but did not technically break the rules, and he and his partner Ion Zamfirescu won the fifteenth Monte Carlo Rally. The Schells had to settle for second place. Their Delahaye had performed better than they could have imagined, but they fell short.
The next month, Lucy performed dismally in the Paris–Saint-Raphaël. Her only consolation was that Germaine Rouault won. Lucy had recruited the twenty-eight-year-old Frenchwoman to drive for “Blue Buzz,” her new sports-car race team.
Lucy suffered a further poor performance at the Paris–Nice Rally, another event in which she typically ranked well. In addition to competing herself, Blue Buzz was represented by Laury, Rouault, and veteran French driver Joseph Paul—all in Delahayes. Lucy was fine on the point-by-point arrivals, but the tests in between took a toll. During the 500-meter race, she mistook the pennants that indicated the finish and slowed too early. During another test, she had trouble starting her Delahaye within the allotted time. Already significantly penalized, she considered dropping out altogether. Instead, she decided to continue on to Nice, hoping to mitigate some of her disadvantage in the La Turbie hill climb.
When it was Rouault’s turn, she almost vaulted up the hill. With her leopard-skin coat and pet dog in tow, she had all the panache of a speed queen, and the same ferocious competitive urge as Lucy herself.
Loudspeakers announced Rouault’s impressive time just before Lucy set off. Her attempt to outdo the younger driver’s time almost resulted in disaster. Lucy took a turn on the perilous course too fast and spun out of control, very nearly launching over the cliff. She finished thirty-third out of thirty-four competitors. Laury won, but that was little balm for his wife.
These defeats devastated Lucy, particularly the Monte Carlo Rally. At almost forty years of age, Lucy knew her chances of being the first woman to win it were now slim. Never one to rest idle, she sought out another goal. Early in 1936, two events, one in motorsport, the other in international affairs, brought one right into her sights.
On February 15, the AIACR, representing the major race car manufacturers, had declared the results of its winter deliberations on the new Grand Prix formula for 1937 to 1939. The previous formula, with its 750-kilogram maximum weight limit, had proved useless in controlling the speed of competitors and had only led to the dominance of the German manufacturers. Every year, their engines grew bigger and more powerful. For the 1936 season, Mercedes was fielding a supercharged, 4.7-liter engine and Auto Union a gargantuan six-liter. These overfed beasts were pumping out ratings of some 600 horsepower.
The new formula aimed to limit engine capacity to lower speeds and to allow for a broader range of car sizes, opening up participation to more manufacturers. The commission proposed a sliding scale of weight-to-engine ratios. Unsupercharged cars would have a maximum capacity of 4.5 liters matched to a minimum weight of 850 kilograms. A maximum capacity of three liters would apply to supercharged cars with the same minimum weight of 850 kilograms. A free choice of fuel was allowed.
Charles Faroux, the wise old man of French motorsport, considered the revised formula a travesty. With their limitless funds, the Germans were sure to produce supercharged engines vastly more powerful than expected. Given the amount and the type of fuel these would burn, not to mention the design complexity, such race cars would “no longer be automobiles,” Faroux wrote. Further, he lamented, his country had no means to challenge the state-funded Silver Arrows, despite his best efforts in that regard.
After the debacle of the 1934 French Grand Prix, Faroux had supported the launch of the Fonds de Course, a subscription fund to aid French manufacturers in the building of a Grand Prix car. Managed by a committee assembled from the regional automobile clubs, the fund raised a kitty of 225,000 francs by selling lapel badges. This sum was split between Bugatti, Delage, and SEFAC (Société d’Étude et de Fabrication d’Automobiles de Course), the last a fledgling attempt at a national race car factory that had yet to field a working vehicle. Nothing much came of the funds, which individually were little more than what Mercedes spent on a couple of engines. Bugatti reportedly bought machine tools with its portion.
At Montlhéry in 1935, a German sweep of the podium led to the outright booing of the French government ministers in attendance. To save his country’s Grand Prix hopes from the “abyss,” Faroux proposed the idea of a 10-franc fee to be charged on every driving license issued. In December 1935, the government approved the measure of a “Million Franc” fund, but it would take at least a year to amass the monies, and the fight over how to distribute it had only just begun. By then, it would be of little use to finance a formula race car. When Lucy read Faroux’s piece in L’Auto and other news articles like it, she knew something must be done much sooner.
The other event that focused Lucy’s mission was Nazi Germany’s occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936. Alongside Hitler’s public declaration about rearmament, this tore to shreds the Treaty of Versailles. It was an act of brinkmanship by Hitler that might well have led to a war, but the French government, already crippled by sporadic riots, an exploding budget, and a sputtering economy, chose to do nothing. A dispatch from the American embassy in Paris to Washington read: “France wants peace and fears war, does not conceal that fear, and will be forced to take the consequences.” Berlin-based American correspondent William Shirer wrote in his diary, “Hitler has got away with it! France is not marching. No wonder the faces of Hitler and Göring and Blomberg and Fritsche were all smiles this noon as they sat in the royal box at the State Opera.”
Through her work as a nurse in World War I, Lucy had seen what devastation a strident Germany could wreak on Europe. She had tended the wounds and miseries of innumerable French soldiers who had fallen in battle against them. There was no love lost between her and Germany, and in motor racing their Silver Arrows had wrecked any chance at victory by a French-made car—not to mention created a drumbeat of propaganda for a Nazi regime bent on supremacy.
In the wake of the new formula announcement and the Rhineland occupation, Lucy made a decision. The time had come to finish her own career as a driver and to concentrate her full attention on running her team. At that time, Blue Buzz was a limited endeavor, focused only on sports-car races and rallies, but she had loved leading its early efforts. In a bold leap, she decided to set her sights on victory in the Grand Prix. She would be the first woman to command a team in that arena, a worthy endeavor in its own right. More important, as she later told Paris Soir, she aimed to bolster “French prestige” and to show the Nazis that their days of unrivaled dominance were numbered. After all, nobody else was rising to challenge them in motorsport.
Taking the by now well-beaten path to the rue du Banquier, Lucy paid Weiffenbach a visit.
“What now, Madame Schell?” he asked. “Your next two cars are nearly ready; we are all soon gathering at Montlhéry for a public demonstration . . . What more can Delahaye do for you?”
“Very simple, Monsieur Charles!” Lucy said. “You can build me a 4.5-liter racing car for the 1937 formula. I’ve decided to run a team in the Grand Prix.”
Weiffenbach was speechless.
She told him the new name she had chosen for the team, Écurie Bleue (Team Blue). It was pure call-out to the color that traditionally represented France, dating back to the early days of the monarchy. “They will be my cars,” Lucy continued. “I will finance the project from top to bottom: design, construction, development, the racing itself. I’m offering you an opportunity which I’m sure isn’t available to any other firm in France. Now, what do you say?”
7
A Very Good Story
WHEN LUCY SCHELL left the office of Charles Weiffenbach that day, there was much to consider. If anybody else had asked him to build a Grand Prix car, he would have laughed them out of his office. He was a businessman, and when Madame Desmarais instructed him to build cars that won races, she meant sports cars that spectators might imagine taking out on the open road on weekends. Grand Prix cars were too powerful and temperamental for the typical driver to handle. Further, they were very expensive to design and produce, let alone maintain over a season. Firms like Daimler-Benz and Auto Union could afford such investments. They were massive industrial complexes with numerous plants, legions of engineers, vast sums of money, and clear government support against which Delahaye was a Lilliputian.
But Weiffenbach had come to expect these demands from Lucy, and he recognized an opportunity when it crossed his path. As a young man in his twenties, he was about to leave for a job in Indochina when he had run into a friend who was considering applying to be Delahaye’s chief of production. Although Weiffenbach had limited technical education and had spent only three years at Ravasse, an engineering firm that had worked on the Léon Bollée tricycle cars, he threw his hat into the ring. He won the position, and his friend took the job overseas.
On the surface, Lucy had presented an outlandish idea, but with her financial support the development of a Grand Prix design would not cost his company a single franc. If they managed to produce a worthy car, the publicity alone would prove a windfall unlike any since the board charged him with making “the marque better known.” Most of all, Weiffenbach liked the idea of returning France to its rightful pedestal atop motorsport. The patriotic name Lucy had chosen for her team sealed the deal for him.
He tasked Jean François to begin development. They both knew that a supercharged three-liter engine, particularly one built by experienced German engineers, was sure to pump out far more horsepower than a 4.5-liter unblown engine. The formula’s authors thought they were equalizing the advantage of superchargers by the greater capacity of their unblown counterpart, but their ratios were surely off.
Designing a supercharged engine was a very costly, time-consuming effort in which they had no experience. Lucy Schell might have deep pockets, but not that deep. Furthermore, Weiffenbach may have been excited over the idea of competing on the Grand Prix circuit, but that did not mean he was suddenly seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. Any design worth doing must serve as the basis for a car that the general public would buy, and a blown engine would be of little use in a regular Delahaye production model, not least because of its high fuel consumption.
François proposed the idea of a V12, unsupercharged engine sized to the formula’s maximum capacity of 4.5 liters. He had already done some work on a design for a sports car, and this could be adapted for the Grand Prix model. Weiffenbach added that it had to be lightweight, efficient, durable, easy to manufacture or fix, and fueled by regular gas.
Over the next few days, François had long working lunches at the Restaurant Duplantin, sketching designs in his notebook. The bustle of life on the Place Péreire outside might as well have disappeared as he worked out his rough plans in pencil. Sometimes he became so excited that he scribbled on the white tablecloth. They were only drawings—and only of the engine. The chassis, suspension, brakes, steering, transmission, aerodynamic body, and a thousand other considerations had to be decided. But it was a purposeful start.
