Faster, page 30
Throughout the rest of the 1938 season, Mercedes dominated. By recruiting Nuvolari, Auto Union managed to win the Donington and Italian Grands Prix, but otherwise it was Mercedes who claimed the French, German, and Swiss races.
The Delahaye single-seater failed to live up to expectations, and René and Écurie Bleue never again challenged the overwhelming power of the supercharged engines of Mercedes and Auto Union. Nonetheless, his two Grand Prix wins (the only ones in a non-German car that season), a fourth-place finish at the Mille Miglia, and a first at La Turbie earned him the title of Racing Champion of France. Pau was his crowning achievement, and as Lucy intended, it was a blow against the invincibility of the Silver Arrows.
The symbolic importance of his victory was not lost on René, nor on the world. John Weitz never forgot listening to the race from London as a youth and feeling a tremendous sense of pride. For Weitz, who later became a successful American entrepreneur, amateur race car driver, and car designer in his own right, René was nothing short of a “divine avenger” for his people. Before the end of 1938, the Nazis would ravage Jewish communities throughout Germany, beginning with the infamous Kristallnacht. In a systematic orgy of terror, hundreds of synagogues were torched, thousands of businesses wrecked, and tens of thousands of Jews forced into concentration camps. Harbingers of hope were in sharp demand.
René was thirty-four at the start of the 1939 Grand Prix season, but thought he might have one or two more years left in him before he retired. He was already in talks with Monsieur Charles about coming on board at Delahaye as a sales director. Their many successes in competition had completely revitalized the firm, and production models based on the 145 had stolen the show at that year’s Paris Salon.
His plan was to settle permanently in the French capital with Chou-Chou. Maurice, recently engaged, was there, and the two brothers looked forward to living and raising their families together. It was time to start thinking of such things.
Continued challenges with the Delahaye 155 hobbled the 1939 season for Écurie Bleue from the start. Lucy was distracted as well. While driving from Monaco to Paris before their last race the previous year, Laury got into an accident. He continued onward but checked into a hotel as soon as he reached Paris. He called Lucy to say he was okay, then went to sleep. In the middle of the night, he tried to reach out to something on the bedstand when he realized that he could not move. The accident had left him partially paralyzed.
The team did not compete until the French Grand Prix in July at Reims, where René finished a distant seventh. Days later, he left for the German Grand Prix, an ominous journey given that he carried in his suit pocket his call-up orders from the French army. War against Germany looked inevitable now.
René managed fourth place at the Nürburgring. At the dinner party afterward, a Mercedes representative raised a toast of “Vive la France!” to him for his performance in the race against much more powerful rivals. Since crossing the border into the Third Reich, René had been treated with every respect, but he could not overlook the escalating viciousness with which the Nazis treated Jewish people. Good decorum would have had René raise his glass and offer a “Vive L’Allemagne” in return. Instead, he remained seated, to an uncomfortable silence.
The German Grand Prix was his last race in a Delahaye. Never patient and still upset over the Fonds de Course decision, Lucy decided to switch her team to Italian Maseratis. At the Swiss Grand Prix on August 20, Mercedes swept the field one-two-three again. René was a lap behind in the straight-eight Italian car.
On September 1, the Nazis invaded Poland. Soon after, France declared war on Germany, and a maelstrom swept across the globe. Less than a month later, Lucy and Laury were being driven back to Paris from their Monaco villa when their chauffeur collided with a van. Both the Schells were seriously injured, and Laury died a month later. On leave from the French transport corps, Corporal René Dreyfus attended the funeral in Brunoy. A heartbroken Lucy remained in the hospital and missed the funeral of her beloved husband and co-driver. At the gravesite, René supported the Schells’ two sons, Harry and Philippe, who were young men now.
In early January 1940, René lost his mother to illness. At the wake, Lucy informed René that she planned to send him to America to compete in the Indianapolis 500. He assured her that the army would never give him permission. In early May, his commanding officer called him into headquarters. Orders from the High Command were that René was to represent France at the American race. Lucy had got her way again.
He tried to convince Chou-Chou to join him, but she said that she wanted to stay in France to look after her mother. There was a shadow over their marriage now, but René could not quite discern its cause.
While he and Harry Schell, a rambunctious nineteen-year-old, were on their way across the Atlantic, Germany stormed across the border into France. There was nothing René could do but read the newspapers and shudder at the horrifying reports. His first days in America were exciting but bittersweet given the events at home in France. He finished tenth at the Indianapolis 500, in a Maserati, his race strategy foiled by rules that bewildered him, including a restriction against passing other cars while it was raining.
The situation in Europe quickly deteriorated. René wanted to go back, but in telegram after telegram Lucy and Maurice urged him to stay in the United States. Paris fell soon after, and then France surrendered to Hitler. Discharged from the army, adrift in America, unable to speak English, his bank accounts frozen, René tried to forge a life for himself. He found a meager basement apartment in New York, and while living there, he learned his wife was having an affair with an official in the Fascist Vichy government. When Chou-Chou petitioned for divorce, her legal grounds were that René was Jewish. Then all word from France ceased. He did not know if his family was alive or dead.
Eventually René opened a restaurant in New Jersey with a Niçois naval officer of some means acting as his partner. René knew a thing or two about fine food and was a born connector, and their business flourished, particularly among wealthy European expatriates. René managed to get by speaking mostly French and Italian, which only made him more homesick.
After the attack at Pearl Harbor, René enlisted in the US Army. He underwent basic training at Fort Dix, South Carolina, and learned English at last. He also became an American citizen. Finally, in the spring of 1943, Staff Sergeant Dreyfus left for Europe and the war. His transport ship’s newspaper made a big deal about how they had a celebrity on board: “Dreyfus was to the French people what Babe Ruth was to the Americans.” After a brief stay in Morocco, he participated in the September 1943 Allied invasion of mainland Italy. Commanding a transport company of two hundred trucks, René endured ferocious German shelling at the landing on the beaches of Salerno. The horrors he witnessed stayed with him for the rest of his life.
After the battle, a newly promoted René moved on to Naples, then Rome, where he served as a translator for captured Italian soldiers. As soon as the south of France was liberated, in August 1944, he caught a military plane to Nice, desperate to know if his brother and sister had survived the Vichy regime. They had not seen each other since their mother’s funeral, nor had they communicated in almost four years.
He went to his sister Suzanne’s last known address, and as he approached the door, he said later, he could already sense her presence. They soon were weeping in an embrace, so overcome with emotion that words failed them. Suzanne’s husband ran off to find Maurice. At the news that his younger brother was not only alive but in the city that very moment, Maurice ran out of his apartment without his pants on.
When the three siblings reunited, stories of their years apart spilled out like spools of thread. Maurice and Suzanne had both participated in the French Resistance. Betrayed, Maurice had spent months in hiding, evading the Gestapo.
In the early hours of the morning, the three spoke of the future. America, René pitched, was the place for them.
When war broke out, Rudi and Baby Caracciola retreated to their chalet in Switzerland. Although fit enough before to drive at the highest level of the Grand Prix, he bowed out of any service to Germany on the stated account of his disability. To supplement the meager food available in stores, he and Baby dug up their flower gardens to plant potatoes, corn, and string beans. They kept chickens as well. While battles raged across the world, they lived like hermits, rarely leaving Casa Scania.
In mid-1941, Rudi ventured to Stuttgart. He had one purpose: to obtain a 1.5-liter Silver Arrow that he had driven to a second-place finish in the all-voiturette 1939 Tripoli Grand Prix. Once the war was over, Rudi wanted to get straight back into racing, and this was the perfect car for him. He could think of nothing else.
Kissel agreed, but only if he could get government approval for the export license, a hard ask at that point. Rudi returned to Switzerland and waited. Meanwhile, fearing the voiturettes and other Silver Arrows were at risk from bombing raids, Mercedes cemented them inside air-raid shelters or secured them in barns in the German countryside.
Throughout 1942, while his former teammates, like Manfred von Brauchitsch and Hermann Lang were participating in the war effort (albeit far from the front lines), Rudi stayed in Switzerland, drawing his pension. This finally caught the attention of the Nazi high brass, who did not care for their top race car driver sitting out the fight in a neutral country. There were even rumors that Rudi was speaking ill of Germany’s chances.
Alfred Neubauer defended Rudi, promising that he was loyal to his country but that his injuries made him unable to serve. The regime cut off his monthly stipend, and Rudi was warned by his former team manager to stay in Switzerland.
During the war, Daimler-Benz continued to be a leading armament producer for the Reich. Its assembly lines made airplane engines, tanks, heavy trucks, armored vehicles, and all the spare parts the Reich demanded. The company built massive plants in Germany and appropriated factories in Nazi-occupied countries. Needing workers by the tens of thousands for these factories, its Stuttgart leaders did not hesitate to force occupied populations, prisoners of war, and concentration-camp inmates into slave labor under draconian conditions. All the while, profits soared.
To get all these vehicles on the road, the German army required drivers and mechanics. Thanks to the flood of recruitment during the heyday of the Silver Arrows, the NSKK provided a force of 187,000 trained drivers. Although many joked that NSKK stood for Nur Säufer, keine Kämpfer (Only Drunkards, Not Fighters), the organization was very effective in contributing manpower to the Wehrmacht’s motorized infantry divisions. For this reason Hitler awarded Hühnlein, on his death from natural causes in 1942, the German Order, the Third Reich’s highest honor.
NSKK troops proved essential in building the fortified Siegfried Line of defenses, operating transport brigades, and executing blitzkrieg operations across Europe. Their motorcycle troops were the self-declared “spearhead of the modern war.” NSKK ranks also played an active role in the persecution of the Jews, starting with erecting roadblocks and bringing in stormtroopers during Kristallnacht. It was NSKK trucks that carried out the deportations and the ghettoization of vast numbers of Polish Jews. Throughout the Holocaust, they perpetrated numerous atrocities, including the shooting of Jews, especially in Russia and the Ukraine.
At the end of the war, after years of relentless Allied aerial attacks, Germany was a hollowed-out shell. Stuttgart had been a high-value target—especially the Daimler-Benz plants at Untertürkheim—and heavy bombing had left it a forest of bent iron columns and heaps of rubble.
As for their Silver Arrows, most of them were grabbed by the Russians, to be studied at the Soviet Union’s technical schools. They showed no interest, however, in the Mercedes voiturette that Rudi had been seeking obsessively. After Germany’s surrender, while most struggled to endure the wasteland that was Europe, he continued his quest to obtain one so that he could drive competitively again. At last he succeeded and soon after was invited to participate in the 1946 Indianapolis 500.
After all his efforts, export restrictions forbade the transport of the cars to the United States, but Rudi traveled to Indianapolis anyway and was offered a Thorne Special to drive. During the qualifying rounds of the race, an object, ostensibly a rock churned up on the track, struck him by the temple. He was momentarily stunned and crashed the car. A severe concussion left him more or less unconscious for almost a week, and it took years of recovery in Switzerland before he could drive again.
During that time, Mercedes returned to racing, first with sports cars. Neubauer again led the team. He brought in a new crop of drivers to join Lang, including Karl Kling and Juan Manuel Fangio. Rudolf Uhlenhaut designed the cars, starting with the Mercedes 300 SL, a design that confirmed his standing as an engineering legend.
In 1952, Neubauer enlisted Rudi to represent Mercedes at the Mille Miglia. Now fifty-one, Rudi finished an impressive fourth. A few weeks later, he competed in another sports-car race at Berne. Coming out of a turn, his brakes locked up and he smashed into a tree. This time his left leg bore the brunt of the impact. “Rudi, oh Rudi,” Baby murmured when she saw him in the Red Cross tent afterward. He spent the next year in hospitals, bound to his bed, and often in excruciating pain. He never competed again.
In 1955, the year Neubauer retired after renewing the Silver Arrows’ dominance in the Grand Prix, Mercedes gave Rudi a job pitching their cars to American and British troops in Europe. Although successful in this new venture, he was drinking heavily, and he died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1959. The firm gave him a hero’s funeral that whitewashed away his role as a standard-bearer of the Third Reich—just as his own autobiography, published after the war, had done. No doubt Rudi Caracciola was one of the twentieth century’s finest Grand Prix drivers, but most people chose to forget the devil’s bargain he made to achieve this dream.
Rudi’s former teammate and longtime rival Tazio Nuvolari also returned to the circuit when peace reigned again in Europe. He and his wife, Carolina, had lost one son to heart trouble in 1937. Then their other son, and last remaining child, died of a kidney disorder in 1946. Afterward he bemoaned, “There is no longer any object in life for me. If I do not return to racing I am finished. Cars are the only thing I have left. I need them; I must travel round the world again. I cannot forget, but I must alleviate my pain.”
The Flying Mantuan, now fifty-four years old, managed some top finishes over the next several seasons, often piloting a new Ferrari-made car, but age and his many injuries caught up with his long-battered body. He never officially retired, but he drove his last race in 1950 at the age of fifty-seven. Two years later, a stroke left him bedridden and partially paralyzed before he passed away in 1953. In Mantua, a mile-long procession followed his coffin to the cemetery. Above the family crypt in which he was buried were these words: CORRERAI PIU FORTE PER LE VIE DEL CIELO (HE WILL RACE FASTER THROUGH THE STREETS OF HEAVEN).
As for Louis Chiron, he never married. He continued to compete in Grand Prix races through his fifty-eighth birthday. After finally retiring, he became the charming, always loquacious master of ceremonies at the Monaco Grand Prix, a race he had helped launch.
During the occupation of Paris, Charles Weiffenbach labored in “constructive non-cooperation” to keep the Delahaye factory from producing much that might aid the Nazi war machine. He was not alone within the French racing community in his resistance efforts. Most notably, drivers Robert Benoist, William Grover-Williams, and Jean-Pierre Wimille created a network of sabotage cells with the British Special Operations Executive (the famous “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”) to fight back against the Paris occupation. Tragically, the Nazis captured, tortured, and killed Benoist and Grover-Williams.
In September 1945, barely a year after the Allies freed Paris, the revival of European racing began on a 1.7-kilometer circuit in the Bois de Boulogne, and the initial race was fittingly named the Coupe Robert Benoist.
After the war, Monsieur Charles led another resuscitation at the rue du Banquier, this time without Jean François, who had died of a lung disease in 1944. Now in his mid-seventies, Weiffenbach remained untiring, concentrating on much-needed heavy trucks and variations of their tried-and-trusted Delahaye 135. Coach-builders like Henri Chapron, Letourneur & Marchand, Figoni & Falaschi, and Jacques Saoutchik created splendid design classics with these cars; as one automobile historian noted, Delahaye was “the undisputed star of the salons.”
Nevertheless, the company struggled to survive in a crippled Europe and a French state bent toward socialism. By the mid-1950s, Monsieur Charles and Delahaye’s owners were forced to merge with the French firm Hotchkiss. When this combined entity was sold, mere months later, the Delahaye marque disappeared into obscurity.
Sometime after the Nazi occupation of France, Lucy left for the United States with her son Philippe. They remained there until the armistice, and then she and her two sons returned to Monaco. She never competed in motorsport again. The American speed queen, one of the preeminent Monte Carlo Rallyers for a decade and the first—and only—woman to own and lead a major Grand Prix racing team, faded from memory. In 1952, she died and was buried beside her beloved Laury in the cemetery in Brunoy.
Twice a week, long before the sun came up, René would drive his Peugeot down to the Fulton Fish Market in downtown Manhattan. He made sure to be there at 5:00 a.m.—not so early that he was sold the previous day’s catch, not so late that he missed the best selections of the day: scallops, mussels, striped bass, soft-shell crabs. He would load the fresh fish and seafood into the trunk of his car and bring it to 18 East Forty-Ninth Street, a stone’s throw from Rockefeller Center, where Le Chanteclair, the restaurant he had opened with Maurice in 1953, was located.
Typically, by the time René arrived from the fish market, his brother would already be there. Together, they bustled about the quiet of the restaurant, preparing for the day’s service with the chef and staff. Then the two brothers would return to Forest Hills, Queens, where they lived, a few blocks apart, for a few hours’ rest before the restaurant opened.
