Early Grand Prix Racing

The early years of grand prix racing was mainly a battle between French and Italian teams, the Germans had passing interests, mainly holding races. It was not until the AIACR created new rules, called “formula libre” in 1934 that German auto makers decided to get involved in the sport in a big way. These rules included a minimum car weight of seven hundred and fifty kilograms with unlimited engine sizes along with a minimum race length of five hundred kilometers. Nazi Germany had decided that they would subsidize a race team to help demonstrate German technological might to the world. This money was originally allotted to Mercedes-Benz solely, but driver Hans Stuck and Dr. Ferdinand Porsche convinced Hitler to split the subsidy equally between Mercedes-Benz and the newly created Auto Union. This racing car would actually become the first automobile that Auto Union, later to become Audi, would ever create. Each of the two companies split a sum of 500,000 reichmarks annually with bonuses for podium finishes. Obviously this money did little to cover the expenses of either company, with Mercedes spending an estimated four million reichmarks each year. The money would mean much more for fledging industry debutante Auto Union. But this money meant that each company would forever be linked to the Nazi regime and be under the party umbrella during the rise of the Third Reich. Both teams would end up creating the two most advanced cars ever seen at the time. Most other teams in the grand prix world decided on the use of 2 liter engines to power their cars, but with the large amounts of aluminum and other light weight materials used by Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union they were able to use 4 liter engines to power their cars. The Mercedes team decided on a more conventional front engine layout for their car, while Dr. Porsche went radical with his design of the Auto Union. His design was for a 4 liter V16 engine to place in a mid-engine layout (meaning in between the two axles) with the driver being placed lower in the car towards the nose. The supercharged Auto Union also ran on a highly secret formula of gasoline that caused nausea and headaches in the spectators at each race. These cars, through various design modifications and rules changes would dominate racing in Europe from 1934-1939 with Mercedes driver Rudolph Caracciola taking the drivers title in 1935, 1937, and 1938. The Auto Union of Bernd Rosemeyer would take the title in 1936. The cars of the German teams basically split the race victories between each other during these years, except for some stellar drives by Louis Chiron, and Tazio Nuvolari in the aforementioned 1935 German Grand Prix. Then in 1939 the rattle of gun shots would silence the sound of racing engines throughout the world altering forever the lives of everyone involved in the Silver Arrows era of grand prix racing.