by Ross Finlay (30 January 2001)
He was born 100 years ago today, decided to side-step his father's hotel business and become a racing driver, and took an unusual route into the really big time: he had to skip town following an incident when he belted a French army officer during a fracas in a bar. He became the undisputed leader of the greatest Grand Prix team of its day - perhaps of any day - won the 1930s equivalent of the World Championship three times, was the European Hillclimb Champion three times, won the Mille Miglia and set a public-road speed record which has never been beaten. And he was regarded by colleagues and competitors alike as a real sportsman.
Rudolf Caracciola was born on January 30, 1901 in the Rhineland town of Remagen, upstream from Bonn. If he wasn't one of the greatest and most versatile racing drivers who ever lived, then who could possibly qualify for that accolade?
There's a tendency for some current Grand Prix enthusiasts to pooh-pooh any results achieved before 1950, on the grounds that there was no official World Championship before then. But in the 1930s the European Championship had exactly the same status, only a more restrictive title.
Anybody who was regarded as one of the supreme aces in a decade when people like
Nuvolari and Rosemeyer were around has to be accepted as being in the all-time top echelon. Caracciola rates alongside later champions like Fangio, Clark, Senna and Schumacher. And like all the great drivers, he was brilliant in the rain, in an era when the top Grand Prix cars were pushing 600bhp through rear tyres which were almost unimaginably spindly compared with today's.
Between 1923 and 1939 Caracciola scored 137 outright victories for Mercedes and Mercedes-Benz (he began racing before the Daimler-Benz merger). But he started as a trainee with the Aachen-based firm of Fafnir, whose name was a familiar one to Germans, and to Wagner enthusiasts: in German mythology, Fafnir was the dragon which guarded the treasure of the Nibelungen.
The company is long gone, having turned out its last car in 1926, but earlier in the decade it built a fine-looking and very sporting Zoller-blown Type 471. It entered its young trainee in his first-ever race at the formidable Avus track in Berlin, with two main straights along different sides of a dual-carriageway, joined by a flat hairpin at one end and a high banking at the other. In his debut race, on that forbidding course, he finished fourth, ahead of all the other Fafnir drivers. But he picked up some victories that first year too, not only in a Fafnir but also on his own NSU motorcycle.
He took a borrowed EGO car - a make that's disappeared even from most historical directories - back to Avus the following year, and scored another win. But he made Aachen too hot for himself after an altercation in the town's Cockatoo Bar, when a group of resident Germans clashed with some French army types, and he knocked out a French lieutenant.
Well, these things are not unheard-of, but the snag here was that it happened during the period after World War I when French forces occupied the Rhineland. Rudi skipped town, ended up in Dresden, and got a job as a salesman with the Mercedes agency there.
His bosses also provided him with a supercharged sports car, with which he won eleven events during the season. They then recommended him to the Mercedes competitions department at Stuttgart, and he was on his way.
He had the legs of the three official works drivers, who included Alfred Neubauer, later to be the greatest of all Grand Prix team managers. In 1923, Caracciola took 22 victories and two second places in the curious weekend events which were all the rage in Germany then. On the first day, the cars were kitted out in road trim. On the second, they ran in racing trim, with no lights or bumpers, and often with a different rear axle ratio.
Then Mercedes introduced the fast, supercharged touring car design which, from 1926 till 1933, developed into the K, S, SS, SSK and SSKL, latterly with up to 340bhp available. Caracciola was the absolute master of it, from his first class win, in a rainstorm, at the Klausenpass hillclimb in Switerland, via two German Grand Prix victories at the Nürburgring, being the first German driver to win the Mille Miglia, winning the 1929 Tourist Trophy on the Ards circuit in Northern Ireland (once again in bucketing rain), and taking two European Hillclimb Championships titles.
In 1930, the championship events ranged from the 41-mile Colle della Maddalena course in Italy to the 1000 yards of Shelsley Walsh. He won the sports car class in both of them.
He also drove a stripped-out SSK in the inaugural Monaco Grand Prix in 1929, against a field of far lighter and far more manoeuvrable Bugattis, and actually got past the lot of them to take the lead at 50 laps. But a long pit stop pushed him down to third, although what would now be called a "podium position" was some performance on such a tight circuit in such a highly unlikely machine.
Mercedes had to trim its staff as the Depression took effect, and Caracciola was actually sacked at the end of 1930 - only to be given a contract as a fully works-supported privateer!
He won the German Grand Prix and the European Hillclimb Championship again, and, taking a chance on new Continental tyres which hadn't had any race-testing at all, won the Avusrennen at what was then the phenomenal average speed of 115mph. That was, remember, on a circuit with a hairpin. Saying something like this without checking all the records may be rash, but that was probably the fastest race average in mainland Europe up to that time.
Mercedes-Benz pulled out of competition after the 1931 season, and Caracciola joined Alfa Romeo. With Alfa, he had nine wins in 1932, including his fourth German Grand Prix.
But his driving was even better than the records suggest. He was leading the
Mille Miglia at 970 miles, when his car broke a valve spring and had to be retired. And although he overtook his team-mate Tazio Nuvolari towards the end of the Monaco Grand Prix, when Nuvolari was running out of fuel and had to switch to his reserve, Rudi graciously let him past again and was happy to take second place, less than half a second behind. Always the sportsman.
For 1933, the cash-strapped Alfa Romeo factory had to pull out of racing too, although Enzo Ferrari's Scuderia Ferrari was effectively the works team at one remove. Caracciola and Louis Chiron took over two of the ex-works cars for their Scuderia CC. Rudi's wife "Charly" acted as team manager, and Mercedes-Benz, which had something serious up its sleeve for Caracciola in a later year, loaned him a race-car transporter.
But 1933 was a disastrous season for Caracciola, and 1934 started tragically.
Part Two