Faster, page 16
In the spring of 1936, René Dreyfus was working for a Delahaye competitor, the Talbot-Lago automobile company. He spent most of his time in its well-appointed offices in Suresnes, a suburb west of Paris. The sign on the door to his office read, in elegant script, CHEF D’ÉQUIPE (team leader). While René’s racing brethren were preparing for the new season, he was wearing a suit and tie and working on creating a factory team for the fledgling manufacturer to compete in sports-car races.
Whenever anyone asked, René was positive about their prospects: he only needed to hire one more driver; their new car was handling well; their schedule of events was all set. “We still have a lot to do,” he declared brightly to a reporter, but they would be ready for their first challenge in early May.
The truth was that he had been forced to hire and babysit an inexperienced driver named Jimmy Bradley, solely because he was the son of the Autocar editor. Worse, and much more troublesome, their car remained hampered by mechanical trouble.
The previous fall, with no other options, René had agreed to become the Talbot race team captain. Company president Anthony Lago almost made it seem like a good idea. Lago was a garrulous, handsome Italian in his early forties, and a first-class charmer in several languages. One of the fifty founding members of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, Lago stood up to Il Duce when he mutated from being a people’s fighter into a militant bent on dictatorship. Lago escaped an assassination attempt by blackshirts, tossing a hand grenade at his would-be killers. He fled Italy. In 1923, after a brief period studying engineering in Paris, Lago emigrated to England. Within ten years, driven by a kinetic energy, he built himself up to be the kind of businessman whom boards bet their companies on.
Lago intended Talbot to be his pièce de résistance. Formed in 1903, the company dominated motor racing in its early years, earning its cars the moniker “The Invincible Talbots.” After World War I, a muddle of reorganizations and mergers had left the original company a mess. Factories in France and England both produced vehicles, often at cross-purposes. Its name, Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq (STD), reflected the lack of focus that propelled the company into bankruptcy by 1934. Its new owners were prepared to sell off the French part of the business when Lago secured a deal to revitalize the Suresnes plant for a modest salary and a share of the profits. By the end of 1935, he owned the company’s continental arm outright and added his surname to the marque. Such was his deft deal-making that he had spent none of his own money making it happen.
As for his strategy to resuscitate the company, Lago was clear. He would cut expenses, produce lighter, more attractive cars, and, as he declared to L’Auto, “in the very near future, we will resume the place Talbot has held so brilliant for a long time in international events.” He tapped René, a premier Grand Prix driver who had not been recruited to any team, to lead their efforts and ordered his engineers to ready a four-liter version of their six-cylinder T150 for the 1936 sports-car season. This would include the French Grand Prix, whose organizers had abandoned the international formula again to prevent a Silver Arrows sweep.
Many rightly argued that it would be a Grand Prix in name only, but no different from the other French events that year that would run only sports cars, including Marne and Comminges. Only Pau, a race garnering more attention each year, would be run under the 750-kilogram formula, but with the Germans fielding no cars, it was severely diminished. In addition, Mussolini forbade any Italian teams from participating in France as long as the League of Nations continued to tighten sanctions against his country in response to his Abyssinian invasion. Yet again, politics trumped sport.
On May 24, René changed his business suit for overalls to compete in his first competition for Talbot: the Three Hours of Marseille. His blue T150 had been fitted with mudguards and lights to match the sports-car specifications. A reporter likened its flat and utilitarian design to a pontoon boat.
At the Miramas autodrome, René and his fellow Talbot driver André Morel faced ten Delahaye 135s and a single Bugatti to see who could cover the greatest distance around the track in three hours. Two of the Delahayes were fielded by its factory team, and three by Lucy Schell’s Blue Buzz, including one piloted by Laury. Before the race started, Tony Lago pulled René aside. “Just go as fast as you can,” he said. “It’s okay if you break down.” They both knew that their cars were unreliable, and all Lago wanted to achieve from the race was to prove that Talbot was back in the game.
René followed the orders he had been given—and then some. After the first round of the five-kilometer circuit, he was leading by 300 meters. He clocked a lap record, hitting speeds of over 125 mph. After the fifth lap, he retired with engine trouble. Morel suffered the same fate and bowed out too. Delahaye dominated, its factory driver Michel Paris (the racing name for Henri Toulouse) winning the race; Laury Schell placed second.
Two days after the race, a strike broke out in an aircraft factory outside Paris. From there, walkouts and sit-ins spread across the city and then enveloped the whole country. The economy ground to a halt, and the value of the franc nosedived. Revolution was in the air, and the red tide of communism looked like it might prevail. No corner of France was immune. Lago was forced to juggle a host of creditors to save Talbot. In Paris alone, 350,000 workers abandoned their jobs to march in the streets. Cafés and department stores shuttered. Hairdressers laid down their scissors, shoe-shiners their brushes.
Ettore Bugatti had long considered his staff to be like his children. “I’ve nothing to worry about,” he remarked after the strikes hit. Soon, Molsheim was in revolt, and his workers took over the factory, refusing him entry through his own doors. Crushed, Bugatti departed for Paris, leaving Jean, his more than competent twenty-six-year-old son, in charge.
Because of the strikes, the 24 Hours of Le Mans was canceled for the first time in its history. Somehow, the ACF managed to stage the French Grand Prix, at Montlhéry on June 28, albeit before a meager crowd. (A horse race that same day sold more tickets.)
René led a team of three Talbots, there were nine Delahaye 135s, and Jean Bugatti showed up with a new sports car of his own design. Wider and longer than the Talbot or the Delahaye, its magnesium-alloy body so resembled a streamlined tank that this was what Bugatti decided to call it: the Type 57G Tank. The veteran French champion Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille each piloted one.
“Your job will be to stay ahead of the Bugattis for as long as you can,” Lago had instructed René. “That’s all I want.”
At ten o’clock, thirty-seven sports cars lined up diagonally by the start, their drivers standing a short distance away, upper bodies bent forward, ready to dash to their vehicles for the Le Mans–style launch of the race. At the pop of the gun, René hurried to his car. He jumped inside the cockpit, started the engine, and was away first. As he had done at Marseille, he finished the initial lap in the lead, but the race was 1,000 kilometers long and would take eight hours to finish—if they were quick.
René fell behind Benoist in the second lap, then was overtaken by Wimille, but he managed to hound the Bugattis for a fair distance. He also set a lap record. Before the halfway mark, the three Talbots each fell victim to a litany of minor mechanical troubles—plugged fuel lines, faulty spark plugs, displaced push rods—that added up to crippling delays.
In the end, Wimille won for Bugatti, and Michel Paris came in second for Delahaye. Talbot finished eighth, ninth, and tenth. Lago was thrilled at the performance. His team captain had again proven the T150’s unmatched speed. René felt differently. He wanted to win—and he wanted to win on the stage of a true Grand Prix.
At the Marne race on July 5, René again outpaced his competitors in the early stages, posting his third lap record in as many races on the twenty-third round of the 4.8-mile road circuit at Reims-Gueux. Lago celebrated on the sidelines, believing that victory was in hand. Two laps later, René drifted into the grass a couple of hundred yards short of the pits. His crankshaft had broken, and his engine was dead. Wimille won again in the Tank.
The Delahaye factory team suffered two crashes at that race. Paris, their best driver, broke his back after hurtling off the road at a sharp corner in the thirty-first lap. Rushed to a clinic, he survived but was paralyzed. A few laps later, his teammate Albert Perrot slid off the road into a ditch. His 135 was crushed—he emerged bruised and dazed but alive. Delahaye had only narrowly avoided losing both its drivers.
At the dinner afterward, René asked Wimille if Bugatti was planning to race at Comminges the following month. He hoped that by then the Talbots would be free of mechanical trouble. “Why, yes, I believe so,” his cocksure rival said. “We’ll be there to see you off again!”
Ever since they shared a hospital room after their accidents at the 1932 Comminges, René had cared little for the lanky, taciturn driver, in part because of a conversation they had about their respective futures. At the time, René had no plans other than to race cars. Wimille wanted to enter politics. When René asked what platform he would represent—and who would vote for him—Wimille simply answered, “Women.” He was that sure of his handsome, rugged looks and charm. The son of a famous and well-heeled French racing journalist who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, Wimille had an easy entry into the sport. Humility was lost on him.
On August 9, they met again at Comminges. In the eleventh lap, René was just readying to overtake the lead from Bugatti when his left front stub axle suddenly snapped. The wheel shot away, and his Talbot careered sideways across the road, skittered over a grass embankment, and came to a grating halt against the side of a house. René emerged from the cockpit unharmed but shaken. Time and experience had made him less prone to believe in the workings of chance, but he felt certain that he needed to leave Talbot to improve his luck and leave the crash behind him.
He finished the season without a single win and enraged over being little more than an outcast on the Grand Prix. Had he been on the official Ferrari team, he would soon be heading off for the Vanderbilt Cup in New York, the revival of a once-famous American race. Instead, he was stuck in Paris, where strikes and unease over Germany persisted. He feared for the future, much like all of France.
While René was competing in French sports-car races, the Grand Prix drew into a contest between the two German automakers. On May 10, 1936, Rudi Caracciola was in distant fourth as the drivers approached the end of the Tripoli Grand Prix. This was his second race of the season. He had won at Monaco, but here, on the fast Mellaha circuit, there was no catching Hans Stuck, who was in the lead. Only Achille Varzi, also in an Auto Union P-Wagen, was even close. With their six-liter engines and improved handling, their cars were unstoppable.
Watching with Governor-General Italo Balbo in his raised booth were two officials from Hitler’s inner circle, Philipp Bouhler and Martin Bormann, their presence evidence of how tight the German-Italian axis had become since the Abyssinian invasion.
As Stuck passed the pits, his team manager, Karl Feuereissen, waved a green flag: the signal to slow down. Given Stuck’s lead, it was a wise strategy; there was no sense in pushing too fast and risking an accident. To Stuck’s shock, Varzi soon closed on him. As they were teammates, Varzi should have been given the same signal to ease back. Moments later, he overtook Stuck and he did not look back. In the final lap, he posted a new course record.
Stuck finished 4.4 seconds later. As soon as he reached the pits, he leaped from his car, removable steering wheel in hand, and yelled about how that “bloody swine” Varzi had stolen his race. An Auto Union mechanic tried to calm him, telling him that Varzi was never given the signal to slow down. In fact, he had been flashed the red flag—to go faster. Now at a boil, Stuck confronted his team manager, demanding an explanation.
Feuereissen drew him aside and quietly said, “I had strict instructions.”
Hans was confused: What instructions? From whom?
“Berlin and Rome have decided that, wherever possible, Italians should win Italian events, even if they’re driving a German car.” Hans threw the steering wheel at his manager’s feet before storming off.
Rumors of their conversation reached Neubauer, then Rudi and the rest of the Mercedes team. That evening, Governor Balbo was holding his annual postrace party, and there were sure to be fireworks.
Rudi arrived with Louis Chiron and Baby. They were almost inseparable again, now that the Monégasque driver had joined Mercedes, a recruitment that Rudi had orchestrated largely to be able to spend more time with his friend’s girlfriend. Although Louis was oblivious to the fact, Rudi had developed feelings for Baby. She was always full of energy, and her friendship had seen him through his worst days. Early that spring, in Paris, Rudi had tried to confess his love for her: “If I could find a girl like you somewhere, I’d marry again.” Baby countered that he would do better to find a “nice young girl.”
Arriving at the Tripoli palace, the three found a scene straight from One Thousand and One Nights. Local soldiers dressed in rainbow-colored uniforms and carrying ceremonial scimitars stood guard on white horses at either side of the wrought-iron gate. More of them lined the wide stairway leading into the palace. Everywhere, as Alfred Neubauer described the scene, were “chalk-white Moorish façades, crenellated walls, pointed gateways and soaring pillars that stood out like filigree against the starry sky.” A band played on a marble terrace above the gardens and fountains, which were all aglitter with light. In a long reflecting pool, half-naked dancers pirouetted in the water.
Dinner was served in a large hall, where over 150 guests settled around a horseshoe-shaped table heaped with platters of food and drink. Governor Balbo sat at the center of the curve, with Hans Stuck to his right—a place of honor that should rightly have been set for Varzi. After hors d’oeuvres, Balbo stood and held his champagne glass aloft. Looking at Stuck, he bellowed, “A toast to the victor of the day.”
Calmer now than before, Stuck tried to protest: Varzi had after all won the race. Balbo would have none of it. “You can’t fool me, Herr Stuck. I saw very clearly how you were pulled back so that Varzi could go into the lead. I don’t like little deals like that. Don’t like them at all. Politics should be kept out of sport, and I emphasize once again that I consider you the true winner of this Grand Prix.”
Several seats away, a glass broke, and Varzi stormed from the hall. That evening he would take morphine for the first time, a drug that almost ruined his life.
Although embarrassed by the scene, Rudi now accepted that politics was inseparable from racing. He remained ambiguous about the Nazis, and on a warning from a friend that Hitler was intent on war, he decided to move permanently to neutral Switzerland. Still, if he wanted to compete, he needed to toe the Nazi line and play the role of one of its heroes. Whenever Rudi mounted the victory stand, he vigorously sang “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles,” and he was content to appear in Reich propaganda that labeled its Grand Prix drivers “swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, strong as Krupp steel.”
The next weekend, in Tunis, Rudi won his second race of the season, but his reign as European Champion—and Germany’s champion—was about to be challenged in earnest by Bernd Rosemeyer. Their duels would set the stage for the lengths to which Mercedes and Auto Union would go to shine brighter in Hitler’s eyes and rule every corner of motorsport.
A blanket of fog settled over The Ring during the seventh lap of the Eifel race, on June 14, and the Nürburg castle disappeared in white cloud. The mist spread across the grandstands, and the scoreboard and signal system faded away. Visibility on the roller-coaster mountain course dropped to fifty yards. Bernd Rosemeyer maintained his speed through the blind twists, distancing himself from his closest competitor, Nuvolari in a red Alfa.
The crowds lining the course heard the thunder of the Auto Union V16 engine. Then, all of a sudden, the silver car broke through the wall of fog only to vanish just as quickly. “It must be a drive of amazing peril, groping through the clouds, in the mountains,” Autocar reported. At the finish, the writer continued, “no one can see the approach of the cars. The staccato bark of the Auto Union is heard at last, and the crowd cheers Rosemeyer to the echo.”
The win was the young competitor’s first of the 1936 season, and his driving mesmerized all who witnessed it. Racing journalists called him “Der Nebelmeister” (The Fog Master), echoing the nickname “Der Regenmeister” that Rudi had earned at his rainy triumph at AVUS a decade before. Afterwards, Bernd’s jovial smile beamed from the newsstands, and profiles of the “thunderbolt known as Rosemeyer” spun from the presses.
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Bernd Rosemeyer on “The Ring” in his rear-engine P-Wagen, 1936
Bernd had been watching automobiles get disassembled in his father’s garage since the time he could crawl. At the age of nine, he was so eager to drive that his parents fixed wood blocks to the pedals of a car and let him have a go. By sixteen, he had saved enough pocket money to buy his first motorcycle, a 200-cc DKW. His persistent speeding around the town caused the police to revoke his license. “Just as a bird needs the air, and a fish needs the water, so Bernd Rosemeyer needs his motorbike,” he once wrote.
In the spring of 1934, Auto Union recruited him to its motorcycle team. Many victories followed. That fall, they invited him to try out for the race car team. Depending on the account, he either wore his best Sunday suit or a new set of racing leathers to the trials—Bernd always liked to stand out. Despite having never driven a Grand Prix car, he finished with the second-fastest time and earned a spot on the team.
With his fast reflexes, ferocious driving style, and natural balance behind the wheel, Bernd reminded many of Tazio Nuvolari. During one race, a stuck brake sent him off the road. He avoided crashing by threading his car between a house and a telegraph pole. There was only a sliver of clearance on either side, but Bernd managed it: “Like a high-speed camel going through the eye of a needle,” one writer observed.
