Faster, page 4
Chiron and William Grover-Williams, the 1929 Monaco winner, jockeyed for first with almost record lap times, while the Italian Luigi Arcangeli nipped at their heels in his Maserati. René bided his time, moving up where he could. Positions changed so often that the leaderboard became a shifting, imprecise mess of names. The spectators—perched over balustrades, hanging out over terraces, climbing light poles—loved it. A Motor reporter regaled his readers: “What a crescendo of blaring exhausts, of hissing brakes, of the sharp phut as a cloud of blue smoke, redolent of castor oil, spurts from a supercharger, or the musical roar of a car’s exhaust as the driver changes up through his gears. What an orgy of excitement.”
In the tenth lap, René broke into the middle of the pack but was almost a minute behind the leader, Chiron, who was already lapping some competitors. Cars had begun to fall out of the race. Count Max Arco-Zinneberg’s huge 7.1-liter Mercedes SSK smacked into a pile of sandbags. Mario Borzacchini’s Maserati hit a wall. Others experienced brake-drum trouble or their engines seized. One German driver lamented that Monaco was “the Devil’s course.”
At twenty laps, René pushed into third place, but Chiron was a minute and a half ahead now. René kept to a fierce pace; sweat soaked his overalls. He drove the Bugatti like he was conducting a brutally swift symphony with his gloved hands. Streaking about the course, he shifted gears almost continuously, accelerating to 100 mph in fourth, then down to 10 mph in first. His grip tight on the wheel, he swung left and right, braked, shifted again. On average, there was a turn every twelve seconds. Throughout he kept watch on his fuel and oil gauges, switching petcocks and regulating the pressure with the hand pumps when needed. His arms ached, and his fingers and palms blistered and grew numb.
The blast of a cannon from a yacht in the harbor announced the halfway point. Only the durable Bugattis, ten in total, continued to run, but the crowd sensed it was a two-person contest between René and Louis. Still, Louis was almost a whole lap ahead.
With each round of the circuit, René nibbled several seconds from his rival’s lead. Shortly after the sixtieth lap, his main tank was ebbing low, so he switched open the fuel line from the auxiliary tank on the seat beside him. Gasoline flowed smoothly to the engine. He would not have to stop in the pits. Louis would.
Into the seventieth lap, the Monégasque remained a minute and eighteen seconds ahead. There was a hustle of movement in his pit, a sure sign that he was about to refuel. Friderich waved his hands to René as he passed, signaling this information. Several laps followed, but Louis did not go into the pits. René could barely see through his oil-slicked goggles. Stopping to clean them, to rest his hands, or to gather his breath would cost precious seconds. Now, with the deadweight of the tank lightening, he could go even faster, go even more nimbly through the corners.
Finally, on lap eighty-three, Louis pulled into the pits. When René came around Tabac Corner into the harbor straight, he saw Maurice and Friderich on the sidelines jumping up and down. “He’s there! He’s there!” As he sped down the parallel straight, he spotted Louis climbing the Avenue de Monte Carlo, shoulders hunched, bent over the wheel, like he was willing himself forward. He had lost fifty seconds in the refueling. René was now ten seconds behind. Within reach. The chase was decidedly on, and he felt like he had sprouted wings.
Everyone among the spectators was asking the same question: “Could Dreyfus do it?” In reply, René tightened contact over the next two laps. Then he saw his opening in one of the hairpin turns in the descent to the tunnel. With a burst of speed, he seized his chance and, sliding out of the corner, claimed the lead. Three car lengths behind, Chiron ripped off his blue crash helmet and tossed it aside.
The fray continued. On the uphill straights, Louis tried to use his superior acceleration to regain the lead, but any gap he bridged was soon widened in the series of corners that followed. Their pace was blistering. On lap eighty-eight, René set an extraordinary average of 60 mph, reducing the record lap speed to two minutes, seven seconds. He pulled away by five seconds, then ten. Louis began to have trouble with a sticking accelerator. René increased the gap to twenty seconds and repeated to himself, “Be very careful now . . . you cannot make a mistake . . . you are going to win the Grand Prix of Monaco.”
At the finish, Faroux waved the checkered flag, and a stampede from the pits encircled René. Friderich and Maurice embraced him at the same moment, almost knocking heads. Strangers clapped him on the shoulder and thanked him for their big payoffs in the parimutuel.
Louis was in a rage. At first he refused to look at René or to shake his hand. That was fine with René, whose hands were a blistered, throbbing mess. When he received the trophy from Prince Louis II of Monaco, he held it in the crook of his arm.
Many celebrations and dinners followed. René drank magnums of champagne, smoked cigars, and basked in the spotlight of his victory. L’Auto headlined, “In magnificent style, young Dreyfus in a Bugatti triumphs over Chiron.” Newspapers featured his boyish face, smudged with oil, on their front pages. Between his first-place prize and sponsorship bonuses, he earned a generous sum of almost 200,000 francs (roughly $130,000 in today’s dollars). More important, he had claimed his first major Grand Prix.
He followed with a victory at the Grand Prix de la Marne at Reims-Gueux, and then, sure of his prospects, traveled to Molsheim to ask Le Patron for a place on France’s best factory team. Embittered over his team’s defeat at Monaco, Bugatti refused to even see him. The snubbing struck René almost physically.
UTCON COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
A weary, but victorious René Dreyfus and his sponsor, Ernest Friderich (on the left), after the 1930 Monaco Grand Prix
He returned heartbroken to Nice, where a note awaited him from Alfieri Maserati, one of six brothers involved in the young Italian automobile firm. Represented by the trident symbol, their race cars were fast and sleek but unwieldly to pilot. One contemporary said that their overly flexible chassis “jumped about on its own suspension like a cat on hot bricks.” Nonetheless, Maserati had a tremendous 1930 season, and René hurried down to Bologna.
There, at the ramshackle Maserati factory, a lone secretary was pecking away at her typewriter in a closet-sized office. She waved René in to meet the brothers, who wore the same double-breasted blue overalls as their workers. The Maseratis gave him a tour, and then they lunched on an impeccable stew at their favorite restaurant, Il Pappagallo. René signed on to be their lead driver for the following year, the shimmering hope of his youth realized.
In his first race with Maserati at the 1931 Tunis Grand Prix, René suffered a terrible crash that accordioned his car. A feeling spawned that a dark cloud was following him. Still, he managed to race well enough in his initial season to be invited back for 1932. He agreed to return, less because his prospects of winning were good and more because he simply liked the brothers. They involved him in the preparation of their race cars. “What do you think about this?” “Let’s discuss that,” was their operating style. Together they went over blueprints. Together they adjusted details on their engines. Together they took test drives in the countryside, often an exercise in literally avoiding chickens crossing the road. There was no pretense. All the brothers were mechanics themselves. They were hard-working, honest, and serious. At the end of each day, they dined together, and René was beginning to jabber away in Italian, feeling part of a tight-knit family.
His ill fortune working with the family refused to lift in his second season. He suffered repeated engine problems and slammed into a house at the Monaco Grand Prix because of faulty brakes. At AVUS, Hanussen’s eerie prediction in Berlin’s Roxy bar hung over his every move.
May 22 was a stultifyingly hot Sunday afternoon for a race. Those Berliners not at AVUS had left for the cool shores of Lake Müggelsee or Lake Tegel. Still, a big crowd surrounded the 12-mile track. Children climbed trees to sit on the limbs for a better view. Many others broke the slats off the fence barriers for the same reason. The grandstands were filled with celebrities—film stars and crown princes here, flying aces, directors, and musicians over there.
René took off in his lipstick-red Maserati from the start. With its sixteen-cylinder, supercharged five-liter engine, the Maserati thundered like an aircraft barreling down a runway. It was the fastest car he had ever driven, and he led the race after the first lap. Close behind was Rudi Caracciola, in a 2.3-liter Alfa Romeo, and Brauchitsch, in his Mercedes SSKL (the “L” signifying a lighter version of its predecessor the SSK).
For 1932, the Grand Prix was essentially formule libre: there were no restrictions on engine size, weight, or fuel consumption. This allowed competitors to field cars of every sort, their common aim being to increase their vehicle’s speed. Their handling had not received the same attention.
Prince Lobkowicz was driving his white-and-blue Bugatti T54, a car that was notoriously difficult to pilot. At the first turn, before the south loop, he found himself pressed between two racers. He gave way but when trying to avoid a clip of the grass to his right swung his wheel a fraction too sharply to the left. At 125 mph, the Bugatti sheared sideways, barreled across the grass strip separating the straights, then leaped upward, tumbling and flipping for some sixty feet until it struck a tree. It settled in a mangled wreck on a railway embankment. Lobkowicz’s skull was fractured in the crash, and he never regained consciousness.
The race continued unabated. Early on, René set a new lap record at 130.5 mph, but then his accelerator began to stick, keeping his speed up even when he wanted to slow. He managed to release it before hurtling off the track. Then he turned into the pits, cut the engine, and pushed the Maserati toward his slot. “It’s over,” he said breathlessly to his team as he pulled up.
“No,” Ernesto Maserati rebutted. “You must finish the race for your lap record to count.” The mechanics and Ernesto inspected the car. Ernesto identified the problem, tore off a piece of tin from the signal board, and jammed it somewhere into the crevices of the Maserati’s floorboard.
“It won’t work,” René said.
“Just finish the race,” Ernesto pleaded. “If the accelerator gives you problems, there’s always the button on the dash to stop the engine.”
René returned to the track, his mind churning over what he would do if the accelerator stuck while he flashed toward the north or south loop. Change gears, hit the brakes, and punch that button.
The long pit stop and the accelerator trouble put René in dead last, where he stayed throughout the rest of the race, but he finished—and was alive. Brauchitsch, who had flailed about in his SSKL cockpit like he was caught in a tempest, narrowly won over Rudi Caracciola, who was like an automaton.
Later at the hotel, René went to see Ernesto. The faulty accelerator had almost got him killed. René wanted off the team, sure enough in his ability now among the elite drivers that he would easily find a new home—one with more reliable cars.
“Please release me,” he pleaded.
Ernesto agreed.
That night, Brauchitsch rang the Roxy bar in Berlin to find out what was written on the piece of paper inside the envelope. The bartender read two names: “Lobkowicz. Brauchitsch.” Word of the prediction quickly spread among the drivers.
Forces beyond their control seemed to be steering their fates, and René could not help but think that his name could have been in that envelope just as easily as Lobkowicz’s. The dream of being a professional race car driver was inexorably bound to the risk of losing everything to maintain his place in the world. He was not alone in facing it.
2
The Rainmaster
IN A SNUB-NOSED Alfa Romeo, Rudi Caracciola shot around the fourteenth—and final—lap of the 1932 Eifel race. Through the steep rolling hills, hollows, and forests south of Bonn, he maintained his lead over his competitors on the Nürburgring, a track that one historian noted must have been built by “an intoxicated giant sent out to trace the road.”
Only René Dreyfus was within contention, twenty seconds back. Driving one of Louis Chiron’s privately owned Bugatti T51s—the more efficient and more powerful successor to the 35B—René was running a strong race, particularly considering that he had only left Maserati the week before and this was his first time battling the unforgiving “Ring.”
Among the 120,000 fans who lined the 14-mile course that threaded around the medieval ruins of Schloss Nürburg, few, if any, thought that the Frenchman had a chance this late in the race. Rudi would need to make a mistake, and he rarely made mistakes, even on a course whose elevation changes were almost as frequent as his gearshifts. A smooth, rational, and imperturbable driver, he always coaxed the best out of whatever car he was driving but never overestimated its ability. “Rudolf Caracciola was the most deceptive driver,” a contemporary wrote. “He never seemed in any hurry, and yet look at his record!”
As expected, Rudi won the checkered flag. The only surprise of the race was that he had piloted an Alfa Romeo instead of a Mercedes. For years he had been one of the Stuttgart firm’s foremost stars, and his name and its brand were almost synonymous.
Rudi liked Mercedes, but he was devoted to whichever car gave him the best chance to win. Like many drivers, his allegiance to any one country or company, even the one that had secured his place in the sport, mattered little. He might never have had a chance to be so single-minded—or raced professionally at all—if not for a haphazard brawl that set him on his path in the first place.
The band at the Kakadu nightclub in Aachen, Germany, roused up the crowd to its feverish beat. Sitting in a red upholstered booth beside his coworkers, Rudi Caracciola drank a brandy and smoked. The twenty-two-year-old was not one for dancing, and anyway, he was tired, having just finished up his mechanic’s shift at the Fafnir Auto Works.
Even though it was 1923, Aachen remained occupied by Belgian forces as part of the Versailles Treaty. They were a ubiquitous, and unwelcome, presence in the town.
An argument broke out between the group of mechanics and some Belgian officers. One of them, as wide as a door, pushed his way over to the booth through the crush of clubgoers. Rudi edged out of his seat.
As the Belgian officer wheeled back to hit one of his friends, Rudi sprang from the booth and struck him. The Belgian’s nose cracked like a walnut, and he crumpled to the floor.
A second later, Rudi and his friend burst out of the door of the Kakadu and ran through the maze of cobblestone streets until they stopped under the shadow of the cathedral. As Rudi caught his breath, the import of what he had done fell like an anvil. Assaulting an occupying solider was a serious offense.
“You’ve got to get away,” urged his friend. “This very night.”
A clatter of hobnailed boots sounded through the streets—a patrol, out already searching for him. The two mechanics hid as a band of Belgians passed, rifles slung over their shoulders. Aachen was a small city, and they would already have a description of Rudi. He wore a rumpled blue suit, one of more expensive quality than a mechanic could be expected to afford. Just shy of six feet tall, he was built like a spade, square-shouldered and slim-waisted. He had dark hair swept cleanly back from a high forehead, over coal-colored eyes, a pug nose, and a square jaw.
Rudi always had an unfettered appetite for trouble, one that he first fostered at his family home, the riverside Hotel Furstenberg in Remagen, Germany. Before he was out of knee socks, he was known as “The King of the Rhine Valley Scoundrels,” a suitable nickname for a boy with a noble bloodline that ran a thousand years back to roots in Italy, hence the non-Germanic name Caracciola. When Rudi was fourteen, he lost his father during World War I, and his mother Mathilde was too busy managing their hotel afterward to curb her son’s growing rebellious streak. He worked the manually operated elevator like it was a vertical racetrack. He borrowed a guest’s Mercedes before he could see over the dash—lurching ahead, grinding the gears, nearly hurtling off the road. He also ran a bootleg wine operation and commandeered the hotel’s yacht to charge passengers to cross the Rhine. His mother chalked up the incidents to high-spirited youth and smoothed over the uproars that followed.
Most of these antics, including ordering thick volumes of automobile catalogs “for the hotel” on the sly, had a common theme: mastering the newfangled contraptions of speed. Rudi came of age during the era of the record-setting Blitzen Benz and the winning of the 1914 French Grand Prix by his countryman Christian Lautenschlager over Georges Boillot on the eve of war. Motor cars would always come first for him, before school and before running the hotel. His mother tried to convince him otherwise, but he did not bend.
The family thought he might come around if he actually had to work in a gritty automobile factory. The job they secured him at Fafnir only heightened his enthusiasm, and he even won a few chances to enter their cars in some races. While competing, Rudi found that the faster he drove, the calmer and more at ease he became. He struggled to find such peace in any other part of his life.
After a midnight motorcyle ride to escape Aachen, Rudi arrived back home and awakened his family. They gathered around the breakfast table. “Done something foolish, my boy?” his mother asked.
The family hotel was also in the occupied Rhineland, and they risked trouble if he stayed. His mother gave him 60,000 marks, and his sister Hertha handed him the business card of S. T. Rathmann, a manufacturer she had met on the train who was from Dresden—outside the Allied occupation zone. Rathmann might be able to offer her brother a job in the automobile business.
