Faster, page 19
In February 1937, before Rudi went to Monza to trial the W125, the latest Mercedes formula car, he traveled to Paris to see Baby. A recovered Louis was away skiing in Austria, but all reports were that he would not be joining any team for the season.
Again Rudi proposed. They were well suited, he said. He promised the kind of life she wanted, one of stability but with the thrill of motorsport in the mix too. He would build her a grand villa on Lake Lugano in Switzerland. They would pass the rest of their lives together.
Again, Baby refused him. She believed that Louis would marry her if he knew that losing her was his only other option. Bereft, Rudi left for Italy.
At Monza, Mercedes engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut presented him with a marvel. In only six months, Uhlenhaut had reinvented the Mercedes formula car, a surprising accomplishment for anyone and particularly so for a thirty-year-old mechanical engineer of reserved demeanor, little management experience, and a preference for staid tweed jackets.
When he was hired as technical director for the Mercedes racing department, Uhlenhaut inherited a team of 300 engineers, technicians, and mechanics, most of whom were dispirited after the performance of their 1936 design. That autumn, to plumb the problem, Uhlenhaut had taken a pair of the supercharged W25s out for a spin around the Nürburgring. To keep the excursion quiet, only a few mechanics joined him.
Uhlenhaut had never driven a race car, and he started out at a snail’s pace, but after a thousand miles of driving over the next few days, often at top speeds, he had a better understanding of what he needed to do. To begin with, he replaced the box-section chassis, which warped and vibrated on uneven roads, with a stronger, oval tubular frame made of a nickel, chrome, and molybdenum steel alloy. He lengthened the wheelbase by a foot to provide stability. He improved the brakes and overhauled the front and rear suspension, softening the springing and providing much better traction at high speeds.
As for the engine, Uhlenhaut stayed with the straight-eight but increased its capacity significantly, to 5.66 liters, and improved its crankshaft. In tests at the Untertürkheim plant, the engine developed an incredible 589 horsepower. To stay under the 750-kilogram maximum weight, most of the car was built with advanced light-alloy steels.
For several weeks, Rudi trialed the W125. The wheels clung to the road, and it was fast—faster than anything he had ever driven. He reached 88 mph in first gear. In second, 137. In third, 159. In fourth, the top gear, he accelerated to 199 mph. He was elated by these results. At last he had a new weapon against Bernd Rosemeyer and Auto Union.
While Rudi was trialing the new Mercedes in Italy, René and the Écurie Bleue team traveled south from Paris in two trucks, each towing a covered trailer with a Delahaye 135 on board. The sides of the trucks were painted with the team mascot, a British bulldog. Lucy owned a pair of the breed and was mad about them.
The team was headed to the Pau Grand Prix. Again, no German or Italian teams had entered the race: the ACF had decided for yet another year that only sports cars could run in events in France, and in protest these foreign teams refused to participate.
Jean-Pierre Wimille was the obvious favorite, especially after he posted record practice times. His Bugatti T59 had been built for the Grand Prix, but the supercharger was stripped out to meet the sports-car regulations. René’s best practice lap was a dismal five seconds slower. On race day, February 21, a wet afternoon, Jean-Pierre took the lead and never lost it. René finished in third place, a minute back.
Next, René competed in the Mille Miglia, another first for him. Rudi Caracciola maintained the distinction of being the only non-Italian driver to have won the 1,000-mile Italian race. During the first half of the race, conducted in a pounding April rain, René was running well. He was in second place and only thirteen minutes behind Ferrari driver Carlo Pintacuda. Over such a long race, that was a surmountable gap. René was closing on the Italian, on a stretch of the course near the Adriatic Sea, when he came to a mountain bend. René cut too close to the edge of the road, and his tires spattered hunks of mud across his windshield and visor. Temporarily blinded, he shot off the road, hit a rock, and flipped his car. Thrown clear, he was fine apart from some bruises and wounded pride. Some farmers hauled his car back onto the road with a pair of oxen, but he had to retire from the race.
René’s close run on the leader and a third-place finish by teammate Laury Schell were the best showing by a French team in the Mille Miglia’s history. Overaggression in the mountains probably foiled the race for René, but if Lucy was any example, better that than timidity.
On March 27, lingering in the glory of his Pau Grand Prix win, Jean-Pierre Wimille drove the Bugatti T59 again, this time with its supercharger returned to its rightful place, in an attempt at claiming the first tranche of the Fonds de Course money. He had a good start at pacing the Montlhéry road circuit at better than 146.5 kph average, but mechanical trouble forced him to stop before the required sixteen laps. He suffered the same in a follow-up run the next day. Then, proving just what a fix the competition was, the Fonds commission extended the March 31 deadline—in recognition of Ettore Bugatti’s “past great efforts.”
When reporters asked Weiffenbach his opinion on the extension, he demurred. Tony Lago was less diplomatic, stating that the commission should just give Bugatti the 400,000 francs and be done with the charade of equality. Lucy did not express her thoughts to the press, but the commission’s efforts on behalf of Bugatti were yet another example of the entrenched old boys’ establishment that defined her sport—and world—and it left her numb.
On April 12, the Bugatti team tried again. Jean-Pierre made a good standing start and managed the first lap in five minutes and seventeen seconds, only a ten-second-slower pace than he needed to maintain throughout the sixteen laps. He made up this lost time and finished the 200 kilometers with an average speed of 146.7 kph in one hour, twenty-one minutes, and 49.5 seconds. It was a few blinks of the eye (4.9 seconds to be exact) under the baseline time limit.
“Bravo, Jean-Pierre,” headlined L’Auto. Asked if he had felt any fear about how hard he had to push his Bugatti to beat the speed target, Jean-Pierre cockily answered, “In no way.”
Over the course of 1936, he had bested René with his precise, emotionless driving style. He never missed the opportunity to needle René about his poor performance while he was driving for Talbot, and the two were becoming heated adversaries.
Now Jean-Pierre was popping champagne corks over his Fonds win—dubious though it was—and boasting that the million francs would be his by August.
René aimed to snatch the prize away before then. Monsieur Charles and Lucy were no less determined to beat Bugatti to it. But their Grand Prix car remained unready.
Throughout April, Jean François continued to struggle with building his new engine. Early in the new year, their foundry had cast the magnesium-alloy cylinder blocks, but during the process these had developed gas bubbles. When they cooled, their skin was porous and they failed to hold water under pressure. They looked like a hill of termites had burrowed into them. Delahaye was experienced in casting blocks in iron but new to working with magnesium.
In late spring, François succeeded in assembling an engine. Then, during runs on the testbed, other issues arose. Again the magnesium blocks presented problems, this time because the alloy expanded and contracted at a different rate to the steel in the studs that held it in place. The engine tore itself apart when heated up.
Dispirited with his progress, especially after Bugatti claimed the initial Fonds prize, François considered abandoning the whole design. When Monsieur Charles failed in his gruff efforts to spur him onward, Lucy offered her own: work until it works.
9
The Winged Beetle
IN MAY, RENÉ found himself back in a Maserati, this time at the Tripoli Grand Prix, positioned at the rear of the starting grid. The red 1.5-liter voiturette looked like a toy car compared to the formula Grand Prix models at the front piloted by the Germans and his former Alfa Romeo teammates.
On weekends when there were no sports-car races scheduled, Lucy permitted René to run in voiturette class events as an independent driver, and Maserati provided him with one of its cars for several competitions during the 1937 season.
In Tripoli, the organizers allowed voiturettes to compete to help fill out the total field of thirty, even though the small cars had no chance against their bigger cousins. René was one of eleven drivers in his class, most of whom were much younger. The voiturette class had its own victor, though the prize was one-third the amount awarded to the overall winner. Regardless, participating was a far cry better than sitting in Paris listening to the event on the radio.
It was over 100 degrees on the Mellaha track when Governor Balbo lowered the Italian flag. The formula cars, a mix of Silver Arrows and Alfa Romeos, were long gone before René, whose Maserati was sluggish at the start, moved into the first high-speed turn. Before he finished the lap, a thick haze of churned-up sand obliterated any sightlines.
The Maserati was a nimble, punchy little animal, and by the halfway point René led his class. Over and over, the formula cars screamed past him through the fog of sand, seemingly out of nowhere, sometimes at speeds of over 175 mph. Inhabiting the same track with these beasts was terrifying. Nevertheless, René came first in his class, showing the same skill and steeliness that had made him a top Grand Prix driver in the past.
The Mercedes W125s swept the field, the first time the new model had been raced. Hermann Lang, a twenty-eight-year-old former Mercedes mechanic, won for the team and was the star of the celebration at Balbo’s palace, much to the chagrin of Rudi and Manfred von Brau-chitsch. A year before, Lang had been servicing their cars. When the team grabbed a drink at the bar, Manfred ordered “champagne all around . . . Oh, and a beer for Lang.” Nobody paid much attention to René, nor to his class win in the Maserati.
Between sports-car and voiturette races, René often visited the Delahaye factory to check on the 145. Jean François kept tinkering with the engine until every cylinder leak, loose valve, and structural weakness had been fixed. The magnesium block weighed half of what one cast in iron would have weighed. So, though it tipped the scales roughly the same as the 135 engine, the V12 provided 50 percent more power and turned 1,000 rpm faster.
In early June, René received a call from Baby Hoffmann. She wanted him to come over for dinner, alone. It was an odd invitation, particularly because she and his wife remained good friends since their Scuderia Ferrari days together. René arrived to find Baby stuffing her suitcases. “I’m leaving Louis,” she said. “I’m going to marry Rudi.”
René made no effort to convince her to stay. It was her life. Neither could he give her the approval she wanted. Louis was one of his closest friends. Further, although René did not believe Rudi was a Nazi sympathizer (unlike Manfred), he had clearly bent under pressure to be one of its foremost, Hitler-saluting heroes. Instead of pointing this out, René simply drove her to the train station.
Early the next morning, Louis hammered at his door. René answered, and his friend stormed into his apartment. “How could she do this to me?” Louis demanded.
René failed to calm him. Louis was beyond reason and forgetful of the fact that he had stolen Baby from her husband years before. He left in the same rage in which he had arrived.
Death, rivalry, betrayal, and politics—together they had irrevocably riven apart the Grand Prix world.
On June 19, Rudi and Baby wed in a quiet ceremony in Lugano, Switzerland. Photographers snapped the newlyweds on a balcony overlooking the lake, their smiles irrepressible. It was the happiest Rudi had been in years. Three days later, they boarded the German ocean liner Bremen to travel to the Vanderbilt Cup in New York.
In the opening months of the season, Rudi had found little success in the new W125. In Tripoli, he had been slowed by a faulty supercharger and some interference with his former teammate Luigi Fagioli, now with Auto Union. At AVUS on May 30, Mercedes and Auto Union fielded cars with souped-up engines and aerodynamic bodies for the non-formula event, which was attended by Goebbels and other Nazi high brass. In the long straights, their rockets reached over 240 mph. Rudi suffered engine failure, and Lang won again.
Then, on June 13, Rudi finished a distant second to Bernd Rosemeyer at the Eifel race. After the race, the young driver returned the swivel stick that Rudi had given him in 1935, with an admonishment. “Well done, my dear fellow,” Bernd said. “But in the future don’t just drive round and round the circuit; use your head.”
Rudi was looking for revenge, and he hoped to find it at the Vanderbilt Cup. The race, founded by the wealthy railroad family at the turn of the century, and boosted by big cash prizes, was intended to develop motorsport in America. World War I brought its first run to an end; then, in 1936, another Vanderbilt scion restarted the event. Interest blossomed after Nuvolari’s meteoric win in 1936.
For the 1937 race, Adolf Hühnlein sent both Mercedes and Auto Union to compete. Victory there would boost exports and, more important, provide a huge propaganda win for the Reich.
During their five-day voyage aboard the Bremen, which the Nazis promoted as the world’s most advanced high-speed ocean liner, Rudi and Baby rested by the pool, shot clay pigeons from the deck, played billiards and deck games, watched films, gambled, and dined extravagantly. All the ship was abuzz with the news of their impromptu marriage. In a temporary truce, Bernd and Elly gave the newlyweds an antique pewter mug. They were rarely left alone, particularly since both German teams were traveling with the usual entourage, there to support their drivers: Rudi and Englishman Richard Seaman, driving for Mercedes; and Bernd and Ernst von Delius for Auto Union. Two high-level Nazi officials were also present—Jakob Werlin and Dr. Bodo Lafferentz—as well as several SS “minders.”
One night the ship’s captain invited the racing parties to his table. Nearby sat a large Jewish family. Lafferentz, who led Strength Through Joy, a Nazi state-operated leisure organization, blustered loudly, “In future, Jews must not be allowed on any German ship.”
The captain stood up to him. “That is a family of ten, from Hungary. They travel on my ship at least twice a year, and they are most welcome.”
The table went quiet, as the thoughts of those present turned to what the SS would do to the captain once he returned home.
Days later, the Bremen moved into New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, under a pouring rain. As the team disembarked and the Silver Arrows were unloaded, a few protesters on the docks shouted “Nazis!” and threw rotten cabbages at them.
The ugly scene failed to mar the adoring reception they received in the city, especially from the press. Such were the crowds that team officials hired bodyguards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The spotlight focused mostly on the young Auto Union champion and his “aviatrix” wife. “Hello Bernd!” read one headline. Noted American columnist Bill Corum wrote, “This Rosemeyer family is in a deuce of a hurry. He drives at almost 250 mph on an autobahn, she flies almost as quickly around the world; what will happen one day if they have a son? There will be nothing left for him but to visit Mars in a rocket.” Little did Corum know, but Elly was pregnant with their first child.
At the Roosevelt Raceway in Long Island, reporters and fans marveled at the Silver Arrows. They had never seen cars flash by at such speeds, nor make so much thunderous noise, nor tear around the narrow, windy course like they were running on rails.
American champion Rex Mays, in an independently run Alfa Romeo, was out of his depth. Early in the race, Bernd and Rudi jockeyed for first place. On the tenth lap, Bernd blazed down a straight at 158 mph to catch up with Rudi and barely slowed going into a sharp bend. His P-Wagen looked like it might fling itself off the track, but somehow he drifted perfectly out of the turn into the lead.
In the end, Bernd easily won the race and the $20,000 purse. At the prize-giving, the grand doyenne Margaret Emerson Vanderbilt mooned over him. Face blackened with grime but for the outline of his goggles, he looked a true conquering hero. After she handed Bernd the oversized silver trophy, she said, “Sir, I think you’re just grand and your motor car is wunderbar.”
The New York Times remarked that the German cars made the race the “most spectacular automobile marathon ever witnessed in this country.” Only the disappearance of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific garnered more coverage.
The win was a publicity bonanza for the Third Reich. Hühnlein ensured that the German press back home parroted his press releases about the triumph in America. Lines to be quoted included: the “swastika flag hung on the victory mast at the raceway for over four hours”; the American drivers were “motor-cowboys” while the Germans were considered “gentlemen” who showed “impeccable order and discipline that left a lasting impression”; and the Silver Arrows showed undeniably that “German technology” was superior to anything in the “New World.”
There was even a brief report that some New Yorkers had scrawled well-wishes on the boxes of spare parts the teams brought to the track. “We hope that you win! Heil Hitler!” read one. “Show the Americans what German racing cars are! Heil Hitler!” read another.
When the Mercedes and Auto Union drivers returned to Berlin, huge crowds greeted them. Bernd was promoted to SS captain and feted by Himmler. Rudi avoided the attention.
