Bernd Rosemeyer: Nigel Roebuck's Legends

Like every driver of real stamp down the ages, Rosemeyer was outstanding from the moment he began. Briefly he raced motorcycles with success, but grand prix racing was his aim, and over the winter of 1934-35 Auto Union gave him a test, following it up with a contract of sorts.

Invariably Auto Union played second lead to Mercedes-Benz, for the unwieldy rear-engined cars were very difficult to drive, and the best drivers were usually on the Mercedes payroll, led by Rudolf Caracciola. In 1935 Auto Union’s leading men were the consistent Hans Stuck and Achille Varzi, the wayward genius whose best years were tragically squandered to morphine addiction.

Auto Union had need of a major star, and Rosemeyer believed he was the man. But when the entries were posted for the first German race of the season, at the Avus, he found he was not down to drive.

Two weeks to go before the Avus. Will Rosemeyer get a drive?’ Auto Union’s team manager began finding notes scribbled on his calendar, and this continued until eventually he relented. Rosemeyer did drive at the Berlin track, and within weeks became the team’s mainstay. He mastered an Auto Union as no one else, even Tazio Nuvolari, ever did, perhaps because he had nothing to unlearn. He never raced a front-engined car before driving the tail-heavy machines; indeed his first race in any car was that event at the Avus.

Once in a generation, this sport throws up a man whose talent and personality meld inexplicably to produce a kind of magic, which puts him on a plateau, alone. Villeneuve had it, without a doubt, as did Ayrton Senna and so did Rosemeyer.

That first season, 1935, ended with a victory, in Czechoslovakia, and the following year was one triumph after another, even though his battle with Mercedes was invariably a lone one, for Auto Union had no other driver remotely of his class. Rosemeyer had an absolute inability to give up, charging at all times, leading or not. In 1936 he won at Berne, Pescara, Monza and the Nürburgring, and thus became European Champion in only his second year of racing cars. The concept of the Auto Union ensured that it was an oversteering car, which tended to snap sideways very suddenly. It was this characteristic which Rosemeyer exploited to such advantage. Where lesser men were intimidated, he was at ease. Yet his driving was only part of the story. At a time when Germany was preparing itself for war, Rosemeyer’s personality pleased his countrymen, a refreshing contrast to the quiet Caracciola and the haughty Manfred von Brauchitsch.

“Grand prix racing was an astonishingly snobbish society in the 1930s,” Raymond Mays once told me. “At Mercedes, von Brauchitsch and Caracciola were the established men, the aristocrats, and when Dick Seaman arrived they accepted him, foreigner or not, as one of their own class. But poor Hermann Lang started as a mechanic, and von Brauchitsch couldn’t stomach that particularly as Lang was an infinitely better driver than he was!”

Into this sort of society came Rosemeyer who, on the face of it, was the personification of Hitler’s fairhaired Aryan hero, the embodiment of courage and youthful strength. The German Chancellor believed grand prix racing was of considerable importance to the country’s propaganda machine and even appointed one of his Brownshirts, Adolf Huhnlein, as a kind of overseer of German motor racing.

Rosemeyer, however, loathed pomposity, rarely passing up an opportunity to puncture Huhnlein’s authority. Before the 1937 German Grand Prix, the drivers were given a lecture on the subject of morals. German men and women, they were told, do not kiss in public; there must be no displays of affection before a race. Bernd had a quiet word with his colleagues. As race time approached, Huhnlein and his Nazi cronies took their seats in the stand whereupon all the German drivers climbed from their cars, returned to the pits and seized their wives and girlfriends. The spectators roared their approval.

Bernd’s wife was a celebrity in her own right. Under her maiden name of Elly Beinhorn, she had been the Amy Johnson of Germany, and on one occasion was allowed to take the wheel of an Auto Union. She, like her husband, was not easily fazed.

In 1937 there were more wins for Rosemeyer, and at the end of the year the Germans came for the first time to England, then very much starved of serious motor racing. Folk here were accustomed to`voiturettes’, with ERAs as high as they could dream; real grand prix enthusiasts could only read of Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union.

The impact upon them of that famous autumn day at Donington has been documented to death, but undoubtedly it was a classic event, a battle between Rosemeyer and a very much on-form von Brauchitsch. Bernd ultimately won what was to be the last race of his life.