| Auto Union: Formula Failure | ||
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by David Finlay (25 May 01) The most wryly amusing element in what is at times a dark and disturbing story concerns motor racing's rule-makers. Every so often the cry goes up that Grand Prix cars are too fast and that something must be done about it. Frequently the result is that the cars go faster still; equally good examples of this can be found nearly a hundred years ago and within the last five. However, the most astonishing own goal took place in the early 1930s, when manufacturers such as Alfa Romeo were producing cars which seemed unacceptably fast. It so happened that the fastest of them all were generally the heaviest, so for 1934 a new formula was introduced which demanded that all Grand Prix cars had to weigh no more than 750kg (excluding driver, tyres and fluids). The heaviest and fastest cars of previous years were no longer eligible, so everything was now all right. Wasn't it? Well, what the rule-makers had somehow failed to notice was that light cars accelerate faster than heavy ones. What's more, they failed to put any restriction whatever on power outputs. It was therefore possible to fit a monstrously powerful engine into a car whose relative lack of weight the rules did not so much allow as insist upon, assuming anyone had enough foresight to carry through the theory. Italians As Losers The Italian manufacturers did not. The German ones did, thanks to the second of the three principal elements in the Auto Union story, a certain Adolf Hitler. In the early 1930s Hitler was engaged upon his attempt to convert Germany from an economic disaster area into a major world superpower. Two of his ways of doing this were to spread enormous amounts of propaganda across the world and to maximise the country's knowledge of engineering technology. He could not achieve the latter through the aircraft industry, as the post-Great War Treaty of Versailles forbade it, but he could certainly do it - and trumpet the success of his new Germany - through motor racing, a sport he had always loved. Somebody had to design, build and run the cars, of course, and the obvious choice for this largely state-funded enterprise was Mercedes-Benz. But Dr Ferdinand Porsche, the third part of our three-piece jigsaw, was able to make the case for a second German team, which would intensify worldwide interest in the sport by competing against Mercedes with a car which he just happened to have designed. The idea was accepted, and the manufacturer chosen to become involved was - curiously - Auto Union, a conglomerate of four small firms including DKW, known then (and later) as the builders of what were considered little more than funny toy cars. Their Porsche-designed racers turned out to be anything but. Mercedes was as careful and methodical about this project as it has been about nearly all the others in its history. Its cars, while undoubtedly faster than anything that had ever been created before, were just about recognisable as a development of previous motorsport thinking. Porsche, on the other hand, was a man who delighted in trying out new and often hare-brained schemes. One of these was to fit the phenomenally powerful V16 engine into the middle of the Auto Union rather than up at the front. Another was to use the notorious swing-axle rear suspension layout which made the lowly Volkswagen Beetle (designed by the same man at around the same time for the same boss) famous for its tendency to spin. Auto-Union racers had rather more power than Beetles. The most brutal of them all, the six-litre C-Type of 1937/8, produced 500bhp - a very substantial figure even now - and 620lb/ft of torque, which obliterates the best efforts of modern Formula 1 cars. Location Problems Today's racers are often quoted as reaching speeds of around 200mph. Well, an Auto Union could do that too, despite tyres which are narrower and less grippy than you will find on almost any current road car. Braking efficiency wasn't up to much either. And an extra complication, which did not affect Mercedes, was that the placing of the enormous engine forced the driver forward to the point where he was almost sitting between the front wheels. That was a problem for drivers, because by the time they felt a tail slide starting to develop, the back end was already almost uncatchably far off line. Auto Union legend has it that the reason the brilliant young Bernd Rosemeyer handled these cars better than any of his team-mates was that he had never driven anything else. He had jumped into an Auto Union straight from a career as a bike racer, must have assumed that all Grand Prix cars behaved that way, and simply got on with the job. Clearly these were terrifying cars, but it would be a mistake created by nearly seven decades of hindsight to call them crude. By today's standards they are certainly primitive, but you only have to look at what else was around in the 1930s to realise what an enormous step forward they represented. Look at a contemporary Alfa Romeo, or Bugatti, or ERA - wonderful, entrancing cars, beautifully built using the finest technology and talent available. Then park an Auto Union beside them. The difference is literally shocking. Could the same shock be created today? Not the way Formula 1 stands at present. The reason all Grand Prix cars now look very similar is that they are forced to. The engines, the transmissions, the wheels, the tyres, the aerodynamic devices, the chassis layouts, even the basic shapes are enshrined in the regulations, leaving only talent and funding to make the difference between the cars, and leaving the rule-makers more time to find unsuccessful ways of slowing them down. |
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The bellowing, almost undriveable monsters that ran under the Auto Union name in Grand Prix racing between 1934 and 1939 owed both their existence and their overwhelming performance to a combination of three vital circumstances that could perhaps never have occurred at any other time.
