A British regiment, the Scots Guards, eventually replaced the black American unit. On the transfer day the incoming major pulled up to the castle forecourt in an officer’s jeep and formally introduced himself to the Count and Countess von Trips. While the major inspected the house, a pair of departing Americans struggled to start a coughing, backfiring jeep. Von Trips jumped into the major’s jeep and pushed them down the lengthy driveway. The major returned from the castle tour to find his jeep missing. “In a magnificent cloud of dust I rushed back,” von Trips said. “At full tilt I shot through the gate, and right outside the castle I slid to a quick stop with full brakes.” He stepped from the jeep and greeted the major in English with a slangy black accent. “May we present our son,” his parents said.
Stealing a jeep from an occupying officer was no small offense, and the major might have jailed von Trips. In the end, he judged it not worth the trouble.
It was not von Trips’ last brush with martial law. A Scots Guard sergeant gave him an old set of British tires for the Opel. When a military patrol spotted them, they pulled von Trips over and arrested him for possession of stolen property. A tribunal sentenced him to house arrest and confiscated the tires. The sergeant could not testify on von Trips’ behalf because he had fallen out of a window and died during a drinking bout.
When his sentence was over, von Trips sold the Opel and bought a British prewar JAP motorcycle with no lights, muffler, or starter. “She stood out and made a spectacle of herself,” he said. “I dreamed of my JAP. I wish I could have taken her to bed.”
Von Trips was driving the JAP to school in Bad Godesberg, outside Bonn, when the motorcycle slipped out from under him on wet tram tracks. He fell and broke his hand. The pain was excruciating, but he tried to hide the injury from his parents. Inevitably they found out and traded the JAP for a jeep so that he could travel in comparative safety. They knew their son was in some ways ill-equipped for messing with motorcycles and cars. He was too dream-headed, too tender. They knew him as a gentle child with an almost girlish weakness for the natural world. He rescued swallows from nests perched precariously on high window ledges and lovingly cultivated carnations and tulips. He listened rapt when his mother played Chopin and Liszt. Throughout his life von Trips’ sensitive, ingenuous disposition would add to his appeal, particularly to women. At Bad Godesberg he fell in love for the first time. He had met “a girl who lit me on fire, made both of my ears red.” He walked with her beside the Rhine talking of his future like any lovesick teen.
When Wolfgang left for agricultural school at Walsrode, in Lower Saxony, his parents agreed to pay for a light 125cc Maico motorcycle from their modest budget. He was stopped at a railroad crossing one day when a classic twelve-year-old BMW 500 motorcycle with a black gas tank pulled up beside him. “She was like a princess in a fairy tale,” he said.
“Holy buckets,” he told the rider. “This is a beautiful thing. Where did you get it?”
“From my brother,” the rider said. “He was killed in the war. During the war it was under a blanket in the hayloft.”
Von Trips memorized the license number before the gate lifted and the BMW took off. He tracked down the driver, who offered to sell it for 1,750 deutsche marks. “Seventeen hundred fifty deutsche mark isn’t much for a princess,” von Trips said. He sold his radio, wristwatch, and, finally, the Maico. He was still short.
Von Trips had a tendency to faint when he went without eating. He likely suffered from diabetes, though it was never diagnosed. To ensure that their son ate properly away from home, his parents made a deal with a hotel near his school: they would pay a generous monthly fee. In return von Trips could show up at any time for a complete meal.
The count and countess were unaware that their son revised the terms in order to complete his motorcycle purchase. He went to the hotelier and struck a deal: von Trips would take 90 percent of the payments; the hotelier could keep 10 percent without providing any meals. With his parents’ money now rerouted to his own pocket, von Trips financed the BMW.
By 1950 von Trips had finished his agricultural studies and returned home. He was on a break before attending business classes—typing, bookkeeping, and shorthand—in preparation for managing the farmlands. At age twenty-two he could look forward to a life spent raising flowers, apples, and potatoes on the family grounds. Like his ancestors he would be an aristocrat farmer. A good marriage might even restore the family name.
At a local motorcycle rally he met a plumber and locksmith in his early thirties named Hans-Rolf Clasen. Clasen’s workshop, along with the neighboring restaurant that his family operated, became a second home for von Trips and the center of a roughneck motorcycle life hidden from his parents. The two joined up with a young cheesemaker named Helmut Beyl to form a racing team. They called themselves the Wild Pigs. They wore leather jackets, slicked their hair back, and painted boars’ heads on their fenders. They spent weekends tearing down country roads and skidding into hay bales.
Whenever he could, von Trips snuck over to Clasen’s to tune his motorcycle and talk about racing at the family restaurant. Clasen’s wife packed their rucksacks with slices of bread and butter and saw the Wild Pigs off to motocross rallies all over Germany. Afterwards Frau Clasen washed von Trips’ mud-splattered clothes so they would not raise suspicions at home. For the first time he was earning something on his own merits, without a count’s entitlements.
Von Trips belonged to the impoverished nobility, and it amused his new friends when he borrowed money for gas and motorcycle parts. Clasen could afford to help. He earned a good living selling stolen and scavenged radiator components on the black market.
Beneath his leather jacket von Trips was still sickly and physically unsuited to long racing excursions. “He sleeps easily,” Clasen said, “and if he stays awake, mistakes creep in or he loses focus.” Clasen nicknamed von Trips “Tripsy Butterbread” because he weakened without food. He could lose as much as four pounds over the course of a race. “Man, Trips, now eat something,” Clasen said, and von Trips obeyed.
The young count struck his new friends as too soft for life outside the castle. “The count was a chicken,” said Clasen’s nephew Helmut, who was then a teenager. “He had no courage. The question about him from a young age was why does he have a boy’s body but a girl’s mind? When he got a little older he realized he was afraid of just about everything, and he forced himself to prove that he was indeed a man. All his life he would try to prove that—not to the world but to himself.”
In his urgency to prove his ruggedness, von Trips developed a bent for mishap and accidents. “We often went together to the Cologne skating rink,” Helmut Clasen said. “In the summertime there was a go-kart track set up there. One day we were out there having fun, and all of a sudden the count was on fire. His wool sweater, which was hanging loose around his shoulders, had dangled a sleeve over the exhaust and caught fire. Suddenly there was the count, jumping off and rolling himself on the infield to get the flames out.”
Clasen added, “He always had accidents. Things never worked out, but he would try again and again to get it right.”
Even as he fumbled the go-kart, von Trips was thinking ahead to his next step. Motorcycle racing was the lowest rung of motor sports. If von Trips was to become the next Bernd Rosemeyer he would have to graduate to cars. A school friend named Friedrich-Victor Rolff raced a Porsche, and he urged von Trips to join him. He introduced von Trips to Hans-Willi Bernartz, president of the Cologne Porsche club, and a circle of amateur drivers. “At the moment my dreams are haunted by Porsches,” von Trips wrote in his diary.
His Porsche came sooner than he dared hope. Bernartz, who was a lawyer, had a client who was repairing a 1.3-liter Porsche damaged in an accident. He was willing to sell it for 4,500 deutsche marks. Von Trips sped over on his motorcycle to inspect it. He did not have the money, but Bernartz wrote a letter of guarantee. Von Trips then sold his motorcycle and used the proceeds to prepare his Porsche for raci
ng.
On March 5, 1954, von Trips entered his first car race, a rally in the Rhineland town of Bad Dürkheim. With no money for lodging, he slept in his car the night before the race. Rolff won. Von Trips finished third. “I’ve become a different person since I got the Porsche,” he wrote in his diary, adding that he had “forgotten just about everything else: writing letters, working, whatever.”
He was so debt strapped that prize money and modest sponsorship deals became a necessity. He helped pay off his Porsche with long-distance races for Tornax, a German motorcycle manufacturer. “Every gold medal meant 75 smackers,” he said.
Bernartz tried to help von Trips solidify his racing career by referring him to Alfred Neubauer, who had directed the stirring Silver Arrow Mercedes teams of the 1930s and managed the company’s return to racing in 1952. Neubauer rebuffed von Trips, saying he had no use for well-born dilettantes. “What we need, and now possess, are drivers that will be successful at the Grand Prix,” he wrote back. “We also need world-class champions, and we can’t accomplish it if we try out every gentleman who wants the possibility of training themselves to be a champion on our watch.”
Von Trips was unsure that he could even race his own Porsche after he broke a piston by revving the aging engine too high. It was beyond his ability to fix, and he lacked money for a new one. He went to the Porsche factory in Stuttgart, hoping that they might give him a used one. In the company’s headquarters he met Huschke von Hanstein, a former SS member and head of Porsche’s racing program. Like von Trips, he belonged to the extended family of German gentry. In driving circles he was known as “the racing baron.” He replaced the piston and made a surprise offer: he asked von Trips if he would like to race a Porsche in the Mille Miglia.
“I said, ‘The Mille Miglia? What’s that?’ ”
Von Hanstein explained that it was a 1,000-mile race around Italy, one of the most dangerous and prestigious in the world. “I had never driven a car over 85 miles per hour in my life at that time,” von Trips said, “but I said to them, ‘Of course I’d like to drive in the race.’ ”
He may not have known what he was getting into. Every spring six hundred drivers blasted out of Brescia before dawn and scorched down the Adriatic coast on narrow Italian roads, the blue sea shimmering below. After crossing the mountains to Rome, the cars headed north through Siena, Florence, and Bologna to finish back at Brescia. It was racing’s longest day.
Seasoned drivers hated the Mille Miglia because they maneuvered among packs of erratic amateurs. Plus, it was impossible to remember the nearly 7,000 turns. They rounded them at 140 mph without knowing what lay on the far side. Curbs, trees, and other deadly obstacles waited a few feet away.
If von Trips was daunted, he didn’t show it. He kept his plans a secret from his parents. On the eve of the race he drove his Porsche down the Autobahn. “I was at a crossroads,” he later said. “From now on I belonged to the car with body and soul.”
He stopped at Stuttgart to pick up his co-driver, Walter Hampel. Von Trips was surprised to find that a car accident had left Hampel’s arm in a sling. Hampel, in turn, was disappointed to learn that his co-driver had only driven in two real races.
Nobody in Brescia gave them much notice when they rolled down the starting ramp in Viale Venezia, Brescia’s central square, at 2:28 a.m. For a thousand miles they flew over hummocks and slid around cobblestone corners slick with oil, leaving skids the size of hallway runners. They powered past clumps of Renaults, Fiats, and Gordinis on the coastal straights, pausing only to refuel and wipe dead flies from the windshield.
Hampel found von Trips to be a feckless companion. First he fell asleep during one of Hampel’s shifts at the wheel. Then he wandered off to urinate behind a tree during a refueling stop. “I was half a minute late getting to the car,” von Trips said. “Hampel was behind the wheel, trying to shout louder than he could honk.”
Von Trips redeemed himself with a series of lightning turns at the wheel. “I had never seen the roads before, nor driven the car before,” he said, “but I didn’t make one single mistake.” He saved his best performance for the final 100 kilometers. “There were masses of people on the side of the road, left and right,” he said. “And finally there was the finish line.”
Von Trips and Hampel came in first in the 1300cc class, and thirty-third overall. “The experts looked at us,” von Trips said, “and shook their heads as if to say: how is that possible?”
That evening the count and countess stepped into the dining room of the Bayerischer Hof, a hotel in Munich. The maître d’ asked if they were related to the von Trips who had posted a class win at the Mille Miglia. “I’m sorry, no,” the count said. “My son is studying agronomy in West Germany.” Or so they believed until they read the next day’s newspaper.
Von Trips’ parents could not understand why he would endanger himself after suffering so much childhood illness and narrowly surviving the war. They did not grasp his need to assert his toughness. “I always had the ambition to keep up with the others,” he said. “I could never tolerate special treatment.”
After the Mille Miglia, von Trips tried to hide his racing from his parents by registering under the pseudonym Axel Linther, a name he borrowed from a dead-end branch of the family tree. He was standing on the podium after a second-place finish at the Nürburgring when a friend pointed to the distant edge of the crowd. There was his mother watching him through a pair of binoculars. He waved. She waved back. He came down from the podium and went to her.
With his secret revealed, von Trips felt the need to resolve racing’s place in his future. He had made an identity for himself as a driver, but it conflicted with the future he and his parents had always imagined. Was racing a youthful diversion, or would it replace the agronomy career that he had diligently prepared for? He found himself in limbo, unwilling for the moment to commit either way.
“I have no idea yet how to justify [racing] at home,” he wrote in his diary earlier that year. “But that’s no excuse to justify dropping out, either, because I’ve put time and money into this. Sometimes I see myself as the heir of a noble family that in his youth runs races and later in life has no idea about anything and has no money. I won’t do that. I must learn something else. But I can’t leave driving behind: I’ve put too much into it.”
The uncertainty surrounding his future came to a head on September 19 when an important season-ending race in Berlin coincided with his agronomy exams. Von Trips persuaded his professors to let him sit for the exams on Monday so that he could race on Sunday.
He might have regretted the arrangement, considering the frustrations that followed. First he broke a fan belt and had to scavenge a replacement from a Volkswagen. Then his oil temperature soared to 275 degrees Fahrenheit, obliging him to slow down. “That was the hardest,” he said. “I twirled comfortably around and around, and came in howling with rage.”
Von Trips finished fifth, high enough to earn him the German championship in the 1500cc class. “I thought I was struck by lightning,” he said. “I made the call home: ‘Put the champagne on ice.’ ” But his parents were more concerned with his exams, which he managed to pass the next day. In April he was back at the Mille Miglia, soloing in a Porsche. Shortly after the start he rolled onto the shoulder with a loose fuel pump. A dozen strangers appeared from the darkness to help fix it and send him on his way. By the time he reached Rome he led his class by six minutes.
On the northward run to Brescia a piece connecting the gas pedal to the carburetor broke, so he used a wire to pull the carburetor wide open. Then, with one hand on the wheel, he adjusted his speed by turning the ignition key on and off. “I was strained to the breaking point,” he said, but he managed to finish second in his class.
Von Trips worked as an intern in a Munich bank that spring until his boss concluded that his mind was elsewhere and gave him the summer off to race. In early August he received a telegram from Stuttgart. His hands shook as he read the words: “I
request you call immediately. Daimler Benz. Neubauer.” The Mercedes manager who had earlier rejected von Trips as a dilettante summoned him to a racetrack in Hockenheim for a try-out the next day, then sent him to a series of races in Sweden, Norway, England, and Ireland.
Whatever strategies and skills von Trips developed in those apprentice years he learned from Neubauer, a rotund figure standing astride the pits like a walrus in a flannel suit. He leaned his bulk on a black umbrella while reading from three or four stopwatches slung about his fleshy neck. A chest of iced beer sat at his feet. Von Trips and his teammates called him the Fat Man.
By day Neubauer was a Prussian taskmaster, threatening encroaching reporters with a stick and drilling drivers in blackboard sessions. In the evenings he became a garrulous dinner host performing uncanny impersonations of Hitler and Marilyn Monroe. He could tell jokes in four languages.
“He was an amazing character who could have anybody snapping to attention if necessary, but also show great thought and understanding,” said Stirling Moss, who spent two seasons on the Mercedes team. “In relaxed moments he could have us all rolling about with laughter.”
Neubauer believed that a driver behind the wheel was the “world’s loneliest human being.” He offered encouragement and coaching by devising a system of hand signals and handwritten placards. In truth, he may have created the system to control drivers more than support them. When a driver ignored his sign to slow down he stood shaking his fist in the middle of the road. By one account he even waved a pistol at the driver.
Neubauer is said to have concocted a racing restorative made of black coffee, egg yolk, sugar, and wine, mixed with spices. If so, he may have helped von Trips stave off the diabetic spells that caused him to wilt in the cockpit.
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