CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age

by Daley, Robert

  And so one's admiration, looking back, is dimmed.

  The Germans of that era will never be matched. Not only did the Mercedes and Auto-Union factories spend more money (about $1 million a year each) than will ever be spent again, but they employed more people, about 300 in the racing department alone. (The 1959 and 1960 champion Grand Prix car, the Cooper, was produced by a factory employing 25 persons in all.)

  Perfection was sought, and often achieved all down the line. Eight colossal diesel trucks carried cars and gear to each race, one of them practically a factory in itself—it carried lathes, presses, welding gear, etc. Another van, for emergency delivery of a spare car and all the parts that went with it, was supercharged and could race to any circuit in Europe at 75 miles an hour. It was used perhaps for one or two emergency deliveries a year. The race cars were torn down and reconstructed after every race. Among the hordes of experts who accompanied the cars everywhere were fuel chemists, and a specialist on the amount of air pressure to go into the tires. There even was a doctor permanently on hand in case a driver caught a cold before the race or was hurt during it.

  The selection of drivers was itself a production. Nowadays drivers are merely approached by owners, and signed up. But Mercedes ran driving schools for new talent. When an opening in the team occurred, 30 hopefuls would be convened and tried out in last year's car. In 1937, every one of these men crashed except the Englishman, Dick Seaman, and the Swiss, Christian Kautz, and one man was killed outright. The point is not to prove that the Mercedes was a hot car (which it was) but to prove the thoroughness of Mercedes screening of drivers.

  Mercedes and Auto-Union both had to clear new drivers with Hitler first, and this was more than a formality. In 1937, he flew into a rage at the idea of Mercedes hiring Seaman.

  "Are there no German drivers?" he screamed.

  There were, of course, though none as good as Seaman. Mercedes wanted him (1) because he was the best available to fill out the team, and (2) because the factory had production cars to sell in England that would be easier to sell if Seaman were on the team. The factory directors diplomatically waited until Hitler was having a spasm of admiration for the British (he often claimed to feel real affection for them), then attacked again. Hitler agreed: "-But bring me victory."

  The motor racing program was directed by Korpsfuehrer General Huhnlein, and at least three drivers--Caracciola, von Brauchitsch, and Lang—were NSKK storm leaders, though Caracciola seems to have been an unwilling storm leader at best. But state control of motor racing in Germany was hard fact on all levels. The trophies for several German Grands Prix at the Nurburgring during those years were donated by Hitler personally.

  The German Grand Prix of 1938 thus becomes one of the oddest races in the long history of the Nurburgring.

  Mercedes entered four cars, for Caracciola, von Brauchitsch, Lang, and Seaman. If all went well they were to finish in that order. There were four Auto-Unions entered too, as well as a batch of outclassed British and Italian machinery.

  But all did not go well. Caracciola was sick and something seemed wrong with Lang's car. Von Brauchitsch led from the start, Seaman was second, and the others third and fourth. Martial music blared from the loudspeakers, and a quarter million fans cheered wildly as the Mercedes formation rushed by, lap after lap.

  Seaman, in second place, drove briskly but without pressing Brauchitsch for the lead. Brauchitsch was his senior, and the "hold position" signs had been hung out by the Mercedes pits. But an odd thing had happened. On lap six, Seaman had been clocked in the fastest time of the day. The impetuous Brauchitsch, storming down the straights and sliding broadside through some of the corners, was losing ground.

  After 200 miles, both cars stopped for fuel. It was noted that Brauchitsch's tires were badly mauled by his frantic driving, and these were knocked off and changed. Seaman needed gas only. His driving had been so restrained that plenty of rubber was left.

  The Mercedes pit crew—with two cars in at once, and a quarter million fans checking the pit work against watches to see if it was as fabulous as always—got rattled.

  Brauchitsch was pounding the sides of his car, shouting:

  "Let's go. Let's go." Fuel was being pressure fed into his tanks, and now a mechanic shut it off half a second too late. About five gallons of high-octane fuel doused car and driver.

  Furiously shouting for his car to be started, the Prussian von Brauchitsch shook his fist at the pits. The starter was rammed into his car, the engine spun over—and the car burst into flames.

  In an instant, Brauchitsch yanked off his detachable steering wheel and jumped clear. An emergency crew poured chemicals on the blaze, gradually controlling it. The Mercedes doctor sprang forward and began tending to Brauchitsch--one arm had been badly seared. Brauchitsch had ripped off his linen helmet; his red hair flashed in the sun and he was cursing bitterly.

  Meanwhile, Seaman sat patiently in his own car, 15 feet away. He had been refueled and was ready to go, but no one was paying any attention to him.

  "Hey, Lindmeier," he shouted to the chief mechanic. "Let's have a go, shall we?"

  Lindmeier's own coveralls were on fire by this time, but so great was Mercedes discipline that he grabbed up the starting apparatus, inserted it in Seaman's car, and got the engine going. Seaman waved his thanks, accelerated through the smoke and flames of Brauchitsch's car, and stormed back into the race.

  After that, Lindmeier hurried to get his own fire extinguished. A moment later, all the fires out, von Brauchitsch poured water all over his scorched car, tested the metal to see if it was still too hot to sit in, found it cooled, jumped back in, and drove away.

  But he had been so upset and excited that he had neglected to fasten his steering wheel on properly. A few miles farther on he sailed over a humpbacked bridge at 130 miles an hour, and the steering wheel came off in his hands.

  Braking violently, he sat there while the car slewed into the forest. It was completely demolished, but Brauchitsch walked away unhurt.

  Seaman now had a lead of over two minutes on Lang, who was running second. He was feeling, he said later, "extremely good. It was one of those days when everything seems to feel just right." The intense cockpit heat began to burn his feet through his shoes, but this was to be expected, and he ignored it.

  He simply drove with great speed and greater control to the end of the race. No one threatened him. There were no heroics of any kind.

  As he sped across the finish line after nearly four hours of driving, the massed bands played the German national anthem, and Korpsfuehrer Huhnlein and his mob of brownshirts gave the Nazi salute. Seaman stopped at the pits, was lifted from the car, and was carried to the awards platform. There he stood at attention as "God Save the King," rang out for the first time over a German Grand Prix.

  Huhnlein presented him with the trophy, and a great laurel wreath was hung about his neck. Huhnlein then launched into a tiresome speech about the glory of the German automobile industry.

  What Huhnlein was worried about was having to tell Hitler. Rather than report in person, he sent a telegram.

  "My Fuehrer: it is my duty to report that the 11th Grand Prix of Germany has ended in decisive German victory! NSKK Storm leader Manfred von Brauchitsch, taking an early lead and demonstrating great courage and skill, was robbed of rightful victory when his car caught fire during a refueling stop. Consequently the winner and recipient of your trophy, my Fuehrer, was Richard Seaman, Mercedes.

  "Heil, my Fuehrer!"

  The Fuehrer's reaction was a fearful cry of outrage. The race had been scandalously mismanaged, he screamed, and he demanded an immediate investigation of Brauchitsch's disastrous pit stop.

  An investigation of sorts actually was carried out, but after a few days Hitler's rage fastened on something else, and the incident was forgotten. There were no more such incidents because Seaman never won another race. When he died the next year, Germany and England were on the brink of war, but the German ambass
ador to England was instructed to attend his funeral and Hitler sent an immense floral piece— almost the last friendly gestures between the two governments. Mercedes showrooms throughout the world were decked in black.

  The Mercedes and Auto-Unions of those years were the fastest race cars the world has ever seen, or is likely to see. Yet they killed, by today's standards, rarely.

  In the six seasons of German supremacy, from 1934 to 1939, only three drivers of German cars were killed: Seaman; Ernst von Delius, after colliding with Seaman at the Nurburgring in 1937; and Bernd Rosemeyer, who crashed a special Auto-Union on the autobahn in 1938 during a record attempt.

  My own explanation is that those cars, so superior to today's in size, maximum speed and acceleration, were so inferior in cornering and road holding that they had to slow down to a crawl to get round even gentle bends. Thus they simply were not being driven at "killable" speeds during as much of each lap as are today's cars.

  A modem Ferrari will lap the Nurburgring about seven miles an hour faster than Seaman did in 1938, although Seaman's maximum speed was near 200 miles an hour, and the Ferrari's is about 170. That means that the Ferraris are making up time in the corners. A corner that Seaman took in absolute safety at 30 miles an hour is being taken today at 65—and if the driver loses control at 65 he may be killed, whereas Seaman could have stepped out and started walking without ill effects. Curves at the Nurburgring and elsewhere that were "safe" in 1938, are not safe at the speeds at which cars corner today.

  Or put it this way: Of the 174 Nurburgring curves, Seaman took, say, only 30, at speeds fast enough to hurt himself. Whereas the Ferrari may take 120. Thus the Ferrari driver is in as much danger as Seaman on the straights (if you are going to hit a tree, it makes no difference whether you do so at 170 or 200) and is more often in danger on the curves.

  Take the case of Peter Collins at the curve called the Pflanzgarten during the 1958 Grand Prix of Germany.

  Approaching this, the cars race not so much downhill as down a dip in the road, having come over the brow in third gear; just as they reach the brow the driver dabs at the brakes. A moment later the car is airborne, so he can't touch his brakes then; he must do it before. As he brakes slightly, he jams the gear lever into second. At the bottom of the dip he must dab at the brakes again, then, still in second gear, he accelerates around a right-hand bend.

  Mike Hawthorn, who was following, thinks Collins went down the dip under control, but accelerated out of it too abruptly. Phil Hill, who also drove a Ferrari in that race, speculates that Collins did not dab at his brakes before coming over the brow, or if he did they did not respond, and so went momentarily airborne a shade too fast when he could do nothing about it, all his wheels being off the ground. Once at this point, Collins' plight was desperate. There was simply no way he could get round the right-hand bend. In other words, he made his mistake long before he came to the bend that killed him, and then could do nothing but ride the car to the end. He could not turn into the corner early enough. When he did turn, Hawthorn later reported, it was obvious that he was going too wide. "He was only a yard, maybe two yards, out of line, but it was enough."

  He rounded the corner wide and the car slid, drifting out. His back wheel hit the bank and the car lifted, one corner twelve inches higher than the others—at 70 or 80 miles an hour.

  Hawthorn, a few feet behind, had just enough time to suppose that Collins' car would now ricochet off the bank into his own path—"God, I thought, the silly fool, we're both going to be involved in this"-when Collins' car suddenly and unexpectedly flipped over. According to Hawthorn, there was a "blur of blue" as Collins was hurled out, then the great cloud of dust as the Ferrari bounded down the bank. Then Hawthorn was past—"desperately worried, it was so obviously a serious accident."

  In fact, Collins had been thrown at a tree and was barely alive when the rescue crew got to him. He died on board the helicopter flying him to the hospital at Bonn.

  Hawthorn, aghast, drove on automatically. His own car was sputtering by then. He knew he was out of the race. All he could think of was to get round again to where Collins had crashed. He never made it, his Ferrari expiring about seven miles away.

  A race official assured him that Collins was merely shaken up, and he waited beside his car until the race was over, then hitchhiked to the scene of the wreck. Collins had been taken away by then. Hawthorn found a glove, a shoe, and Collins' crash helmet. The helmet was broken in like cardboard, but had sprung back into shape again. There was no blood. At this Hawthorn was overcome with relief. All he could think was that Pete—his best friend Pete—was all right.

  Back at the pits they told him Collins was seriously hurt. The words "brain damage" were used. Hawthorn walked about with Collins' crash helmet, trying to prove with it that Collins could not be hurt— "Look at his helmet. See? There's no blood. See?" But by this time he could not even convince himself. He was frantic with worry.

  At the hospital, when Hawthorn and the others finally reached it, the worst was confirmed. Collins' very small mistake—"He was only a yard, maybe two yards, out of line"— had been fatal.

  Collins' career as a big-time racing driver was brief. He won his first Grand Prix in Belgium in 1956 at the age of 25. He was following Fangio when Fangio broke down. The same thing happened in the French Grand Prix a few weeks later, so that by midseason he had a gigantic lead for the driver's world championship—though he was only a rookie on the tour.

  Fangio kept eating into this lead the rest of the season. Finally, in the last race the two took the mark with Fangio now ahead in points. Collins could, by winning the race and posting fastest lap, beat Fangio, assuming that Fangio did not finish high up.

  Whereupon Fangio did break down. Collins, running second in that race, needed only a bit of luck to win it and the world championship and as he raced on he must have thought—"Me, an unknown kid of 25."

  Perhaps this thought was too much for him. On the next lap he stopped at the pits and turned his car over to Fangio, the man everyone considered "the master."

  With this act Collins in effect resigned from the championship, handing it to Fangio.

  Fangio, Enzo Ferrari (who owned both drivers that year), and the press of many nations lauded Collins for his "sportsmanship."

  But in fact, while he had the skill of a great driver, Collins never had the right emotions.

  "All I could think of out there," he told someone later, "was that if I won the race and the championship I would become an instant celebrity. I would have a position to live up to. People would make demands of me. I would be expected at all times to act like 'the champion.' Driving would not be fun anymore. I wanted things to go on just as they were, and so I handed my car over to Fangio."

  Collins appeared to love the idea of being a famous racing driver, in the two seasons left to him. But he didn't want the responsibilities of being a great racing driver. In the 1957 German Grand Prix, after Fangio, now racing for Maserati, had stopped for fuel, Collins drew alongside his teammate, Hawthorn, and signaled that Hawthorn was to win the race. He, Collins, would be satisfied with second. He then dropped back to follow Hawthorn around.

  But Fangio stormed back, lowering the lap record every time round, overpowered both of them and won the race.

  The next year, Collins told Hawthorn privately that he hoped Hawthorn would win the championship, and that he, Collins, would do everything possible to see that Hawthorn did. In the Grand Prix of Germany itself, only a lap or two before Collins was killed, he drew alongside Hawthorn and signaled once again that Hawthorn was to win; he, Collins, would be second.

  This happened just after Stirling Moss had broken down, throwing Collins and Hawthorn into the lead, and just before Tony Brooks came up from third place in a Vanwall and slipped ahead of both of them. It was while trying very hard to catch Brooks, who had upset all his private arrangements with Hawthorn, that Collins crashed.

  Brooks, who won the 1958 German Grand Prix at the
Nurburgring at an average speed of 90.35 miles an hour, won the same race the following summer at 145—at the Avus track in West Berlin.

  The Avus is not like other road circuits. It uses a strip of autobahn two and a half miles long, the north and southbound lanes about 50 feet apart, the road dead straight and dead flat. At one end of the two lanes is a flat hairpin turn taken at about 30 miles an hour. At the other end the two lanes fan out very slightly, and the one joins the other via a 30-foot-high, steeply banked brick loop.

  Depending on the intelligence or the bravery of the driver, the loop can be taken low down on the banking, or high up. Either way the cars are going nearly flat out, and centrifugal force tries to throw the cars up and over the wall. This banking is dangerous, particularly when wet. The day before the 1959 German Grand Prix Jean Behra was killed there, and in the Grand Prix itself all the drivers took the banking with a slowed-up caution so obvious one could see it.

  The drivers hate the Avus. Stirling Moss calls it a "dump," unworthy of a world-championship race. "If something goes wrong mechanically," says Cliff Allison, "you have more or less had it."

  The 1959 German Grand Prix was only the second ever held there, and with any luck it will be the last. The first was in 1926, while the Nurburgring was still under construction, and it was the first of six German Grands Prix won by Rudi Caracciola.

  The Avus is a freak track, and has always been recognized as one. In 1937, Herman Lang drove a streamlined silver Mercedes to victory there in what stood for 21 years as the fastest race on record. His average speed was 163 miles an hour. The Avus in those days was about 25 miles long. Today the Avus is a truncated version of itself, due to the fact that the old track crossed into what is now the East German sector. When the war ended, it had to be cut down to stay inside the border. Its only feature, then as now, was the north curve banking, located just at the edge of downtown West Berlin. Unfortunately, this escaped the bombing, and so racing on the Avus has continued year after year. Every summer there has been at least one meeting there.