The Highway Kind(40)

Stromlinienwagen 6.5 L

Design Note 14.32 [Dr. Porsche]

Engine capacity to be enlarged to 6.5 liters through a 78 mm bore (75 mm in original 6.1 engine). New pistons, liners, and heads to be machined.*




* See Workshop Specifications Number 633–639 and Materials List Number 55A, 55B, 55C, and 62A.

Each company chose its own stretch of road. These were record-speed runs, not a race. The Auto Union’s first run was southbound, a straight shot through woodland and under a bridge. The speed recorded was very respectable, but not greater than Bernie’s record in the six-liter Streamliner in October. Run two, northbound, took place twenty minutes later. Again, good speed—perhaps a record, but very, very close to Caracciola’s time. Someone in the press reported that Auto Union officials were dubious about another run but that Rosemeyer was willing to try again.

Three times was one too many. I bought every paper available, but most articles reporting the accident talked only about the death of a hero of the Reich and not about how—or why—that death had happened. The Frankfurter Zeitung, the local daily, had a few details. There was no doubt, the journalist wrote, that a wind gust triggered the “wide-open” skid to the left. “After having hit a picket in the grass median, the car went on again, back on the concrete track, as one can see from the black marks.”

I flipped through the other accounts—no one else mentioned a picket in the grass. The Kurhessische Landeszeitung had a quote from a first-aid man who had come to the site of the wreck. The journalist described this gentleman as “quite shocked”—and no wonder, I thought—but he gave it as his opinion that there were two gusts of wind. The first, he said, had forced the car onto the grass median; the second had triggered the deadly skid to the right, after the car was already back on the concrete.

This was nonsense; wind blowing strongly in opposite directions at virtually the same moment for the entire run, which must have taken less than ten seconds? “Do these people even read what they write?” I muttered to myself.

Neueste Zeitung...this was more interesting. Whoever had written the article—there was no name—talked about the airflow, the drag. He got everything else wrong—the direction of the run, which wheels were which in the wreck—but he was right when he said that the longitudinal stability is worsened by an increase in front drag. That means that any side force—as from, for instance, a gust of wind—has a stronger impact at higher speed. Wind that wouldn’t even be felt in a passenger car could—maybe—push a racing car right off the track.

“On this event,” the author had written, “not even a master like Rosemeyer managed to win over the forces of nature.”

I folded up the newspapers into tidy squares and stuffed them into the kindling basket by the stove. It was a cold day today too, and the stove in my sitting room was glowing hot.

Bernie had lost, all right—but was it the forces of nature, some failure of his own famous skill...or some defect in the car?

What had they done to my car!?

Stromlinienwagen 6.5 L

Design Note 67.33A Retention and Placement of Water Radiator

Even though the water radiator has no function, having been supplanted by ice cooling, the radiator itself must be retained at the front of the car in order to balance the weight of the ice tank. (See also Design Notes 80x–93x, on fairings required by altered center of gravity.)

I was still thinking about it in the morning.

There were only two eyewitnesses, according to the reports, both of them officials of the timekeeping team. These men were at the end of the measured course and thus closest to the accident.

Only two eyewitnesses? I doubted that very much. A record run was not a race, so there wouldn’t have been a crowd, but surely there would have been a good number of people present. The car’s crew, naturally—although they wouldn’t have been at the end of the course, they would have seen something. A crew chief and the eight mechanics of a race crew, certainly. Maybe a backup driver. Officials from Auto Union, definitely. Which men would those have been? I wondered. Again—probably not located near the actual crash, but every eye would have been fixed on that car for every second of the run.

I’d read the two “official” eyewitness accounts in the newspapers: Otto Geyer and Carlo Weidmann. I’d talked to many newspaper journalists on many occasions. I had yet to read a single interview of myself without errors, and certainly never one that included everything I’d said. I didn’t know Geyer, but I’d met Weidmann a few times. I pulled out my watch; nearly 3:00 p.m. Perhaps Carlo Weidmann would like to have a cup of coffee. Perhaps mit schnapps—it was a cold day, after all.

Design Note 55.12 Fairings

Fairings to be adjusted so that junction with side-paneling is minimal, ideally less than 2 mm. Fairings to be tapered, with a thickness of five cm at the apex of each fairing, tapering outward to 8 cm at point of attachment. Attachment: bolts at intervals of 15 cm.

See Workshop Order 143/7 for bolt sizing.

“Oh my God.” Weidmann took a large swallow of his drink—he’d chosen calvados to accompany his coffee—and coughed hard. “Oh God. You know how it is when there’s a bad wreck, you know it occurs so fast, you can’t have seen anything, really, and at the same time it seems to move so slowly, like it’s—it’s happening like an ordinary thing, just in its own time, but it’s you that’s frozen, so slow that you can’t do anything?”