| Auto Union: Worth A Lifetime Wait | ||
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by David Finlay (25 May 01) The Auto Unions were bizarrely shaped because they had the engine behind the driver. This was not a new idea - it had been tried with no noticeable success many years before - but it was still a long way ahead of its time. It was only when British constructor John Cooper put it into practice another quarter of a century later that rear-engined Grand Prix cars became first commonplace and then universal. By building his cars backwards, Cooper turned motor racing upside down. Auto Union did not achieve the same feat, which is partly why it was not, during its six years in the sport, as successful overall as Mercedes. Even when I discovered this (as a slightly more knowledgeable ten year-old) I still couldn't let go of the idea that the Auto Unions were the most fabulous Grand Prix cars I had ever heard of. Later still I was amazed to discover that some Auto Unions still existed, but it never occurred to me that I would ever get the chance to see one in action. However, last weekend, at the Richard Seaman Memorial Trophy meeting at Donington, I saw not just one but three. Although Seaman, one of Britain's best pre-war drivers, was actually employed by Mercedes, the main feature of the meeting was a series of demonstration runs involving Audi competition cars. Like The Bookies, All Bets Were Off Auto Union is now part of Audi (though in the 1930s the positions were reversed), and the significance of Donington as a venue is that it was the only British track at which the two German teams competed. British racing enthusiasts, far more insular then than they are today, could not believe that the foreigners would be able to compete on the same terms as their own stars, and to an extent they were right - the Auto Unions and Mercedes absolutely routed the home contingent, and bookmakers who had accepted bets at unrealistic odds were said to have been creeping surreptitiously out of the circuit before the end of the second lap. Bernd Rosemeyer, the astonishing young driver who adapted to the C-Type Auto Union's fearsome characteristics better than anyone else, won at Donington in 1937. When a similar race was held a year later, almost everything had changed. Rosemeyer, not yet 30, had been killed in a speed record attempt over the winter, and the technical regulations had been changed in a desperate attempt to limit the speeds of the cars. Instead of Rosemeyer in a six-litre, 16-cylinder C-Type, the race went to Tazio Nuvolari driving a slightly (though not much) more conventional looking three-litre V12 D-Type whose seating position placed the driver reasonably far back from the front wheels instead of, as on the earlier car, almost between them. A genuine 1930s Auto Union is an almost incalculably precious thing, not to be put to any more risk than absolutely necessary, but it detracted not at all from the atmosphere of the memorial meeting that the C-Type and D-Type on display were reconstructions by the British engineering firm Crosthwaite and Gardiner. C&G have become world experts in these cars, and the two at Donington were built (to an Audi commission) from exact replicas of every one of the many thousand original parts. As a result, they looked, sounded, behaved and in all important respects actually were as authentic as could possibly be wished. If there was one disappointing aspect of the demonstration runs it was that these cars, still hugely valuable despite their modern provenance, were understandably driven with great caution and were only occasionally allowed to show their immense potential. On the day itself I had a bit of a problem with that, but I don't now - after a lifetime of being deeply impressed by Auto Unions, I have now at last seen and heard them, and done so on their first return to a track where they caused such a sensation more than sixty years ago. The "Lost" Formula
There were more modern Audis at Donington, too - the ugly but brutally effective Quattro S1 rally car, a 720bhp 90 saloon raced in America in the 1980s, Touring Cars from the British and German series, and the sports cars which ran so well at Le Mans in 1999 and completely blitzed the opposition in 2000. Even that wasn't the end of it. The now defunct NSU company, which like Audi became part of the Volkswagen Group after the War, was represented by two cars. One of these was a rattly, smoky, utterly wonderful Grand Prix car from the 1920s. The other was a 1960s Spider sports car which rapidly became my favourite car of the whole meeting.
The reason for this is that rotary engines, like two-strokes, respond very well to being fitted with megaphone exhausts. As the name suggests, the exhaust pipe, which is barely an inch in diameter when it leaves the engine, becomes very much wider towards the end. The resulting noise is shattering. Conversation becomes difficult even if you are standing half a mile away, and is completely impossible when the car passes you at its 10,500rpm maximum. The decibel level is hysterically at odds with the attractive looks and modest performance (500cc can only get you so far, after all), and it was this clash of concepts which made the Spider, for me, the most strangely appealing car from the whole of Audi's wonderful collection. |
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I was no more than eight years old when I first became aware of the Auto Union Grand Prix cars of the 1930s. Looking through the pictures of an old motor racing history book, I could see that they competed at the same time as some equally impressive Mercedes-Benzes, but those cars looked conventional by comparison. The fact that an Auto Union looks quite unlike any racer built before or since is the sort of thing that fires your imagination when you're eight.
