Faster, page 25
MERCEDES-BENZ CLASSIC ARCHIVES
Rudi torpedoes down the highway in his world-record speed run for Mercedes, January 1938
After they turned the car around and led him back to the finish line, Rudi waited for the telephone call reporting his time. He smoked a cigarette, his fingers trembling as the adrenaline drained away.
“It’s a record, Mr. Caracciola!” someone announced.
He had completed the mile in 13.42 seconds at a colossal average of 268.3 mph.
The mechanics surrounding the car erupted in jubilation, but Rudi remained sober. He still had to make the run back to the start line. The official record would only be his if the mean average of the two runs was faster than the speed Bernd had posted in October.
Minutes later, Rudi shot forward once again, accelerating until the road became a white ribbon ahead. The car streaked so quickly that it was moving faster than his mind could process his immediate surroundings. He trained his gaze far down the road to watch out for any decisions he would have to make. Aiming the car through the underpasses felt like threading the eye of a moving needle.
Another wave of a flag. Another rush of people surrounded him. He had bettered his time by four-hundredths of a second. His average speed over the two runs was 268.5 mph. It was a new world class record.
“You want to do one more?” Neubauer asked.
Rudi shook his head, unable to muster words. He had already broken Bernd’s record by almost 20 mph.
After navigating the cluster of reporters, he sat with Baby in the warmth of the Mercedes coupé, where she had stayed throughout the attempt. For a few minutes, they said nothing, while Rudi gathered himself after pushing so close to the brink of death.
By nine o’clock, they were back in the Park Hotel. During breakfast with Manfred and Neubauer, who was celebrating the victory with an order of sausages and Jamaica rum, a waiter came to their table. There was a telephone call for Neubauer.
When the Mercedes team manager returned, he informed Rudi that Auto Union was preparing an immediate challenge to the record attempt. Rosemeyer was already on his way from the hotel. They wanted to seize back the record, ostensibly before the next newspaper edition. Neubauer left for the track, but Rudi was reluctant to go and watch. Although he instigated this second round of record-breaking attempts, he knew they should not be run like a race. They were too dangerous already—more so if rushed—and the best time of day to run them was early morning, when the wind was at its calmest. On his way back to the hotel, he had seen a slight breeze in the treetops.
Manfred eventually convinced him they should go, and they drove out to the airport. The winds had only picked up, and Rudi was certain that the attempt would be called off. They arrived just as Bernd was coming back from a warm-up run. The Auto Union mechanics hovered around his car, making some last-minute checks. Since October, they had increased its engine capacity and tried to streamline it further.
Rudi took a look at the windsock above the airship hangar. It stretched straight out, with occasional bursts to the left. He thought it madness that Rosemeyer would try to reclaim the record in those conditions. Pushing through the throng, he approached the Auto Union driver.
“Congratulations,” Bernd said.
“Thank you,” Rudi returned. He thought he should say something about the wind, warn Bernd off the attempt. Auto Union could try tomorrow. Instead, he stayed silent. He would not have wanted anyone raising such doubts with him before he was about to drive. At the speeds they were pushing, nerves could kill.
Off Bernd went with a scream of his engine, and his silver car disappeared around a bend in the road. Almost half an hour later, he returned in a flash. “Good! Good!” he said to Karl Feuereissen. Over the two runs, he averaged 268 mph for the mile. His second run was much faster than the first, and he and his team thought their chances were good to retake the record on the next try.
Bernd recommended that they close off some of the air-intake ports for the radiator to keep the engine hot enough to maintain the high speeds. The mechanics made the adjustments, changed the spark plugs, and topped off the fuel tanks. Soon the car was ready.
The wind had strengthened further. To escape the cold, Rudi and Manfred sat in their car with the engine running. In any case, there was little to see during these record attempts.
At 11:46 a.m., Rosemeyer sped away down the autobahn, the din of his engine vibrating the air. Neubauer stood next to Feuereissen, listening to the staccato call from observers announcing Bernd’s progress toward the starting line, which was located at the highway’s 7.6-kilometer marker.
“Kilometer 5 . . . through.”
“Kilometer 7.6 . . . through.”
The record run had started. Seconds would determine if Bernd had done it.
“Kilometer 8.6 . . . through.”
Bernd neared the gap in the trees where his P-Wagen was vulnerable to side winds.
Nobody knows for certain the cause of what happened next, whether a gust walloped the side panel of the car or whether Bernd altered his road position in anticipation of the wind. But, at over 250 mph, something went irreversibly awry.
Bernd’s tires brushed the grass on the left edge of the road. The car skidded at an angle across the road, an uncontrollable slide. In an explosion of metal, the aerodynamic shell tore away. The car somersaulted several times in a blur of silver, disassembling as it went. It continued to hurtle forward, and Bernd was thrown out of the cockpit. He landed in the woods over eighty yards from the road. The car, now little more than a misshapen chassis on crooked wheels, hobbled to a stop on the embankment by the next overpass. The trail of wreckage was strewn along the highway for almost half a kilometer.
Back at the airport parking lot came the report: “Kilometer 9.2 . . . the car has crashed!” With a face like chalk, Feuereissen dropped the telephone and ran to the nearest car. The entire Auto Union team rushed after him to the site.
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Bernd Rosemeyer at the start of the record attempt that cost him his life.
Sitting in his Mercedes, Rudi unrolled his window and stopped a boy who was rushing past to ask what had happened. “Rosemeyer has crashed,” the youth shouted over his shoulder as he kept running. Rudi and Manfred looked at each other. They had seen enough crashes and enough death to know what awaited anyone who went out to investigate. There was no use in witnessing such scenes.
“I don’t want to go there,” Rudi said.
“Neither do I,” Manfred replied.
Two bystanders found Bernd Rosemeyer’s body resting at an awkward angle against a tree trunk. His face looked serene; his eyes were open. They were unseeing.
That afternoon, an Auto Union doctor rang Elly in Czechoslovakia to inform her of her husband’s death. Soon after, news reports announced the tragedy to a shocked German public. In his diary, lamenting an already “heavy day” mired in politics and Jewish affairs, Joseph Goebbels wrote, “A deadly misfortune. Our best driver is lost in a great and completely unnecessary record race.”
Nonetheless, Goebbels perceived an opportunity and staged a state funeral for his champion in Berlin. To the cadences of Beethoven’s funeral march, Rudi, Manfred, and the other German drivers walked before the casket in their white racing overalls. SS officers stood at attention along the route. Hitler’s own elite company of guards watched over a bereft Elly. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the SS loyalty hymn “Wenn alle untreu werden” (“If All Become Unfaithful”) was sung. Salutes and speeches followed.
The many letters of condolence to Elly from Nazi high officials were leaked to the press for maximum effect. Hitler sent a telegram, writing that “the news of your husband’s tragic fate has left me shaken. May the thought that he fell fighting for Germany’s reputation lessen your great grief.”
Propaganda reframed every aspect of Bernd’s death. He did not perish in a foolhardy test of speed; rather, as Fritz Todt, the builder of the autobahn, remarked, “He died as a soldier in the exercise of his duty.” Elegiac obituaries and photo montages filled German media. A book was quickly put together. Newsreels showed both his triumphant glory on the racetrack and the ugly wreckage on the autobahn.
Bernd was likened to Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero of German mythology. “Bernd Rosemeyer—friend, comrade . . . Your competitiveness, your chivalry, your willingness to serve, your fighting spirit. Winner of many battles. You enter the world of immortality.” Rudi, whose relentless feud with Bernd had incited the January attempt, wrote his own widely distributed tribute bylined, “Your friend Rudolf Caracciola.”
The tragedy did not stop Rudi from discreetly requesting his bonus—10,000 Reichsmarks—from Mercedes for his new world class rec-ords.
There was little investigation into what caused the accident, whether it was a warped aerodynamic shell, driver error, or the impact of a crosswind. “Fate took him from us,” the Third Reich declared. No blame was assigned, at least not publicly, to Auto Union’s decision to allow Bernd to make his run that late morning—or to attempt to break a speed rec-ord in the middle of winter in the first place. As Hühnlein wrote to Kissel on December 1, 1937, when initially approving the “chivalrous match,” the “exceptional propaganda appeal at home and abroad” was worth the risk.
13
“Find Something”
ON JANUARY 19, 1938, nine days before the accident that killed Rosemeyer, René boarded the Théophile Gautier ocean liner in Marseille, accompanied by Laury Schell and their new Delahaye 135 Special. Fitted out for the Monte Carlo Rally, it boasted a high-performance 3.5-liter engine, a light-alloy body, and a full-length undershield of sturdy aluminum bolted to the chassis. Spare tires and wheels were fastened to the side of the hood, and a shovel was strapped under the rear window.
With winter storms lashing eastern Europe, their starting point in Athens looked especially brutal that year, and they needed a car to meet the challenge. Tests at Montlhéry had seen their Delahaye reaching a top speed of 112 mph, making it one of the fastest in the field.
After an extended, and much needed, rest since the Million, René was ready to drive again. Bolstered by his success, he now had the confidence to take on any competition, and the rally was exactly the kind of warm-up he wanted before the Grand Prix season began. Lucy was game, knowing how well his participation had served him in the past.
Crossing the Mediterranean was a fraught affair. The seas were rough, and on several stretches French warships escorted them through the same waters navigated by German and Italian troopships and cargo boats, often supported by submarines, bringing troops and supplies to the Fascist General Francisco Franco in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. René distracted himself from the perilous travel by memorizing every town on their route from Greece to Monaco. After four days, he and Laury safely arrived in the port of Athens, and early on January 25, the starter flag sent them on their way.
Soon they were climbing through the snowbound mountains. It was well below zero, and their icy breath clouded the windows. Neither their fur-lined coats nor their heavy boots kept out the cold, and snow entered their vehicle through the holes for the gear and brake levers. Like sailors in a leaky boat, they were constantly bailing out snow through the windows. Still, they made it through the icy pass and to the first control point on schedule, despite their brake cables nearly freezing to the undershield.
In the mountains between Larissa and Thessaloniki, the snow only grew deeper. The Delahaye lacked sufficient clearance from the road to make it through the drifts unimpeded. Stones were mixed into many of these snow drifts, and while the two rallyers were battling through one such drift, a rock pierced their crankcase. Soon after, the needle on their oil-pressure gauge sank. A brief stop revealed an inky black trail behind their car.
In the next town, they found a mechanic’s shop, but the hurried repair only stalled the inevitable. They continued to leak oil, and every few hours had to stop and refill their engine. They played this stop-fill-go game for three days before retiring from the competition.
Even if they had reached Monaco, they would have had to leave their car out overnight before the flexibility tests. Their engine would have lost all its oil, and the rules forbade adding any more at that point.
The day they abandoned the rally, they learned about Rosemeyer’s fate. Interviewed soon after the news broke, Robert Benoist said, “It’s a tragic accident, but that’s the fate of the job.” René did not care to dwell on it, knowing well the risks he was taking with Écurie Bleue.
Noted journalist Robert Daley summed up best the impact of this kind of accident on racers. “Once the horror and shock are gone he does not think about it, in the way that you and I do, at all . . . We think of it physically. We have an emotional reaction. He can think of it only intellectually: If he enters such and such a corner too fast he will probably kill himself.”
There were only a few dozen drivers in the world at the time whose perspective was trained to this level to pursue victory at mortal speeds. In times past, René had lost this edge. First with Nuvolari, and now more profoundly driving for Lucy Schell, René had rediscovered it.
He and Laury continued on to Paris in their hobbled Delahaye. There wasn’t much for René to do in the city. Jean François had managed to wring out only a little more speed from the 145, and René had driven it enough to know it as well as if it were an extension of his very self. Neither engine power nor driver skill was likely to prove the decisive factor at Pau. Instead, he believed that his desire to win would be all-important. That spring, in the two months before the first Grand Prix race of the season, the Nazis would give him every reason to hone that desire.
On February 18, a thin blanket of snow clung to the parks as Rudi Caracciola led a phalanx of Silver Arrows from the Reich Chancellery through the Brandenburg Gate and down a broad, tree-shaded avenue toward the Kaiserdamm, where the Berlin Motor Show was taking place. Twenty thousand NSKK troops lined their path, and behind them crowds of Berliners watched and waved. At the end of the long procession of motorcycles and cars came Hitler and his chief officials, traveling in a cavalcade of limousines that had been burnished to a shine.
Outside the exhibition hall, Rudi and the other drivers revved their engines, the yelp of the superchargers echoing against the building’s marble walls and deafening the crowd. Hitler loved it, and he offered handshakes to his racing champions before stepping into the entrance hall surrounded by black-uniformed SS. Trumpets sounded as he walked toward a raised platform set in front of swastika banners that rose nearly as high as the glass rooftop. Around the platform stood dozens of NSKK standard-bearers, holding the flags of their mechanized divisions aloft.
Since early February, the Nazi leader had inflamed a world already on edge. He had forced out his two lead generals, effectively making himself the “Supreme War Lord.” Then he replaced his foreign minister with Joachim von Ribbentrop. The moves signaled that Hitler was consolidating his absolute power and readying a more aggressive policy toward his neighbors, possibly even war.
In the second week of February, Hitler summoned the Austrian chancellor, Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg, to his alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden. After a tirade designed to intimidate Schuschnigg, Hitler insisted that he appoint Austrian Nazi politician Arthur Seyss-Inquart as his interior minister and provide amnesty to all Nazi prisoners in his country—or risk invasion.
When Schuschnigg balked at his demands, Hitler said, “You don’t believe you can hold me up for half an hour, do you? Perhaps I’ll appear some time overnight in Vienna; like a spring storm.” Schuschnigg eventually capitulated, an act that a Vienna-based American diplomat believed meant “the end of Austria.”
The many foreign ambassadors and dignitaries who had assembled in the Kaiserdamm for the Berlin Motor Show wondered what Hitler was planning to do next. That morning, however, he spoke only about his “beloved child,” the automobile industry. After a rousing introduction from Goebbels, he came to the podium, notes in hand, and began, in a low voice. “When I had the privilege of opening the exhibition in Berlin five years ago, people questioned the value of such events.” Quickly he gathered momentum, his tone rising almost to a shout, then falling to a murmur, as he charted out his resurrection of the industry and the “incomparable triumph” of its racing cars.
Fists clenched, jaw tight, he pounded the podium and looked out at his rapt audience. He spoke of the NSKK’s success in training 150,000 young men to drive; he enumerated the thousands of kilometers of the autobahn that had been built; and he heralded the huge plant soon to be built to produce the “People’s Car.”
Although there was little applause while Hitler was speaking, there was a sense of “fellowship between the Führer and his listeners,” as one French observer noted. As he neared the conclusion of his speech, fifteen minutes later, Hitler took time to lament the death of “the best and most courageous” Bernd Rosemeyer, and he announced the creation of a “Motorsports Badge” to inspire young people to be like the great Rudi Caracciola, who would be its first recipient for his “fight year after year for Germany.”
Finally Hitler declared the exhibition “Open!” Behind him, curtains were swept aside to reveal the main hall. A brass band played as he stepped down from the podium to begin a tour that lasted three hours.
Set on a high square platform in the “Hall of Honor” was the streamlined Mercedes in which Rudi had broken his world records, and indeed Rudi himself was a star of the whole show, second only to his Führer.
Two days later, Hitler delivered a speech in the Reichstag, stating that “over ten million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our border.” In his view, it was “unbearable” that they did not enjoy his “protection.” He was being far from coy. Seven million German-speaking people lived in Austria, and 3 million Sudeten Germans lived in Czechoslovakia, and he had just put the world on notice that they belonged to the greater Reich.
