TAZIO NUVOLARI. Around Cologne the weather had been fine for days, but on the morning of the race it

Hohe-Acht, the high point of the tough Niirburgring circuit, was shrouded in mist. People huddled under the trees and waited for the rain to stop. There were more than 200,000 of them. It didn't seem that many because they were scattered along fifteen miles of winding country road that cut like a roller coaster through the forest. The Niirburgring was built in 1927, when Conrad Adenauer was mayor of Cologne. He pushed the project through to relieve unem-ployment and incidentally created the greatest challenge any racing driver is likely to face. The course is too long and complicated to learn com-pletely, and the saying goes that no man masters the Niirburgring for more than a day. The crowd that gathered to watch the 1935 German Grand Prix was swelled by the rumor that the Fiihrer himself was going to ap-pear. Swastikas flew from a forest of flagpoles opposite the pits and a prototype Stuka made mock dive-bombing runs at the grandstands despite the bad weather. After this titillating prelude, Mercedes' screaming Silver Arrows and Auto Union's mid-engined Silver Fishes would fight for the honor of the Fatherland and annihilate the feeble foreign opposition.

From his room in the Eifelerhof hotel in Adenau, Tazio Nuvolari watched the rain coming down. He knew that elsewhere in the hotel the German teams were waiting restlessly for the sun to break through, while Enzo Ferrari, the Alfa Romeo team manager, prayed quietly for the clouds to thicken. If the new asphalt laid around the 'Ring still glistened wetly when the flag dropped that afternoon, Mercedes' and Auto Union's glut of horsepower would make the cars difficult and frightening to drive. And that, Nuvol-ari felt, might offer a chance for him and his archaic, underpowered Alfa P3 to snatch a place from the German cars. It would take a miracle, but since the Germans had returned to grand-prix racing the year before, Nuvolari had become used to the idea of having to perform miracles. When the 750-kg formula was an-nounced (maximum weight 1,650 pounds, no limit on engine size), the Third Reich made it known that the sport was to become "a measuring stick for German knowledge and German ability" —aided of course by the Fiihrer's "overpower-ing energy." Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union were instructed to build new cars and the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler—who knew a lot about motor racing—promised the two companies an annual subsidy of 225,000 marks each, plus bonuses for placing in grand-prix races. Accord-ing to the Mercedes team manager, Alfred Neubauer, the subsidy represented about 10 percent of the cost of fielding a team. Nevertheless, Hitler appointed a Nazi Korpsfiihrer to oversee every aspect of the German effort (moral—German drivers were not to kiss their wives in public before the start of the race—and mechanical). Mercedes came up with the W25, de-signed by Dr. Hans Niebel and Louis Wagner, the onetime member of the 1914 Mercedes team. They decided against a rear-engined car—feel-ing it would understeer unmanageably—and laid out a lightweight, front-engined machine with in-dependent suspension and a de Dion rear axle. It was powered by a supercharged straight-eight with two overhead cams operating four valves per cylinder and a full-roller-bearing crank. Ini-tially the engine was 3.3 litres, rated at 354 hp, but by the time the mechanics rolled five ma-chines out onto the grid at the Nurburgring in 1935, the engines under those long, rounded hoods were 4.3's which put out 462 hp at 5,800 rpm. Auto Union's answer to the Fiihrer's call was more radical still. It was known as the "P-wagen" after its designer, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, and it was masterfully simple. The light chassis was two straight tubes which doubled as water pipes from the front-mounted radiator to the rear-mounted engine. The engine was a nar-row V-16 with two valves per cylinder, a single overhead cam, and a blower which gave just nine pounds of boost. By 1935 the capacity had been increased from the original 4.3 to 4.9 litres and output was 375 hp at a mere 4,500 rpm. The gearbox was mounted behind swing-axle half-shafts, and a fifty-gallon fuel tank lay between the back of the driver's seat and the engine. This central weight distribution was the key to the design. It gave the car a low polar moment of inertia, and as the fuel was used up the load on the rear axle changed relatively little by com-parison with a front-engined car where the fuel tank was stuck out in the tail. The Auto Union was a difficult car to drive well, but throughout a race it handled with great consistency. The in-dependent front suspension was as unconven-tional as everything else on the car; Porsche used trailing links and torsion bars (hailed as revolutionary when Colin Chapman introduced them on the Lotus 72 in 1969). With these two machines Niebel and Porsche changed the course of racing-car design as radically as Henry did with the 1914 Peugeot. After 1934 a solid-axle car never again won a grand prix, and independent suspension became standard. The Alfa Romeos, Maseratis, and Bugattis which had ruled the twenties and early thirties suddenly became vintage cars. Ended too was the period of the amateur, monied private owner.

Until the P3 was introduced, Alfa, like the other manufacturers, had always sold to the public the same cars its works team was racing. But after 1934, money couldn't buy a competi-tive grand-prix car. If a man wasn't fast enough to earn a factory drive, he no longer stood a chance. Nuvolari ran a Maserati independ-ently in 1934, but that winter he joined the Alfa team which Ferrari had been managing since 1932, when Alfa officially withdrew from grand-prix racing, unable to bear its rising costs. Nu-volari was forty-three but still the most sought-after driver in the world. He had begun by rac- ing motorcycles and in 1924, when he was cham-pion of Italy, had sold a plot of land his father left him to buy his first racing car. He quickly established himself as the new Boillot. He was a simple man, but behind the wheel of a car he was a genius. His only fear was of dying in bed, which he did. As he walked across the asphalt and climbed into his brilliant-red Alfa Romeo that rainy summer's day at the Nurburgring, there was a long burst of applause. The short, skinny figure was not difficult to recognize. His racing uniform was a bright yellow short-sleeved jersey, baggy sky-blue trousers, and brown shoes with yellow laces. His Alfa was in the fourth row. Ahead of him was a sea of silver cars. Nuvolari's P3 was the finest car that Alfa's great designer, Vittorio Jano, ever conceived and far more so-phisticated than the famous P2 which Nuvolari had driven to victory so often in the balmy twenties. It had independent front suspension and hydraulic brakes. The brake drums were an integral part of the wheel, so that linings could be renewed in the same time it took to change a tire (although linings were still so primitive that a driver used his brakes almost as a last resort). But for all that, Nuvolari still sat above the twin drive shafts in classic but in-efficient style. His teammates were the debonair Louis Chiron, a superb stylist who had been at his best driving Bugattis in the late twenties, and Antonio Brivio, a young Italian count. Both had 3.5-litre engines in their cars, whereas Nuvolari's had Jano's latest, a 3.8-litre supercharged straight-eight, although even this produced only 300 hp.

The one-minute signal was given and Nuvolari started his engine. On the front row his old rival, Achille Varzi, who was feeling ill that day, turned in the cockpit of his Auto Union and nodded to him. Varzi was a precise and calculating individual. He came closer than any other driver to matching Nuvolari's skill in a car or on a motorcycle, and his passion was to beat the maestro. Auto Union, desperate to find men capable of driving its cars, had hired Varzi away from Alfa at the beginning of the season. Varzi realized that Italy would scorn him for "going German," yet he was an unashamed op-portunist and he knew the alternative was obliv-ion. He joined the veteran team leader, Hans Stuck (who had a Jewish wife and was being made increasingly aware of it), and Bernd Roseand inexperienced at this point, master the P-wagen as completely including Nuvolari. The fourth in the field was driven by Paul Pietsch. Mercedes, too, had reluctantly signed foreign talent. Neubauer had taken the plunge in 1934 and hired Luigi Fagioli, a brilliant, un-disciplined Italian, slightly past his prime. Fagioli backed up Rudi Caracciola, the most versa-tile and consistently brilliant German driver to emerge between the wars. Caracciola ranked with Nuvolari and Varzi. He had driven regularly for Mercedes since leaving his job in a Dresden doll factory in 1923. He and Fagioli came to dislike each other so intensely that shortly before arthritis temporarily forced Fagioli out of racing in 1937, he attacked Caracciola in the pits at Tripoli with a hammer. Manfred von Brauchitsch, an insuf-ferably arrogant young Prussian aristocrat, was driving a third W25, and Mercedes had called out two reserves for this race, former mechanic Hermann Lang—whom von Brauchitsch treated with contempt and Hans Geier. The only other cars in the race were a pair of 2.9-litre Maseratis, an English E.R.A., and a semiworks 4.9-litre Type 59—all that re-mained of Bugatti as a grand prix force driven by Piero Taruffi. The Type 59 was the last grand-prix Bugatti to achieve any real success. Ettore Bugatti, the Italian artist-engineer, designed and built rac-ing cars from the age of eighteen, when he ran his own three-wheeler in the Paris-Bordeaux race. His masterpiece was the Type 35, which appeared in 1924 and dominated sports and grand-prix racing until 1930. But during the period of his emi-nence, Bugatti became strangely fixed in some of his ideas. He clung to the single overhead cam-shaft, as used in the Type 35's straight-eight, until 1930, long after everyone else was using two. And the four-wheel-drive Type 53, which ran in a few hill climbs between 1932 and 1936, was the only Bugatti ever to have independent front suspension. It was not surprising, therefore, that his solid-axle grand-prix cars were no real match for the German and Italian cars. With 10 seconds to go, Nuvolari let the Alfa's clutch gently slip and brought up the revs. The flag fell and the roar of engines reached a crescendo as the field squirmed through a cloud of burning alcohol, ether, benzol, castor oil, and rubber dust. Nuvolari followed Caracciola through from the fourth row, but as Caracciola put his Mercedes in front Fagioli got between the two and Nuvolari was forced to plunge wildly past him on the outside to stay on Caracciola's tail into the south curve. They swung downhill through the series of bends to the Flugplatz, the field streaming out behind them. Caracciola gained a few yards. Going down the Fox Throat the Alfa closed, then lost ground between Berg-werk and the Karussell and the hill to Hohe Acht, regained it while going down to leap the bridge at Briinnchen, swept uphill sharply, crested, and dropped down around the Swallow Tail, and lost it once again on the long undulat-ing straight leading back to the pits, where the Mercedes' top speed of 170 mph overwhelmed the Alfa's 150. Caracciola led by 12 seconds at the end of the first lap. The race distance was 312 miles (twenty-two laps), and after this open-ing duel, Nuvolari, feeling at ease, decided to let someone else harass Caracciola. He made no effort to stop first Rosemeyer's Auto Union, and then von Brauchitsch' Mercedes from moving past him. He even let Chiron through on the fourth lap, only to see him pull off into the pits with a broken differential. Brivio was already out with the same problem, so now Nuvolari alone was left to carry Italy's banner. With 250 miles still to go the situation looked hopeless to Ferrari, even though Rosemeyer, who had come within 4 seconds of Caracciola, had overextended his Auto Union and was now falling back. Fagioli had taken over second place, and with von Brauchitsch third, Mercedes seemed set. But on the sixth lap, Nuvolari came alive again. The 130-pound Italian is credited with originating the so-called four-wheel drift and at this point in time the art was exclusively his. (In other words, Nuvolari could control oversteer very precisely to achieve a faster line through a corner—the basis of modern driving technique.) The gaunt, brown-skinned figure in the yellow jersey used this technique on the still-damp road to perfection. He picked off Rose-meyer and von Brauchitsch on the same lap, slid-ing lazily through corner after corner, the Alfa's tail slightly cocked, front wheels flickering. When Fagioli pitted, Nuvolari moved into second, and at the end of the tenth lap howled past the dumb-founded grandstand crowd ahead of Caracciola. There was panic in the German pits and Korps-fiihrer Hiihnlein came over to Neubauer to ask what had gone wrong with the master plan. Neu-bauer refused to be flustered. "Give that little Italian a couple of laps," he said, "and he'll be lying in some remote corner of the track with either his head or his gearbox broken." But Nuvolari still was in the lead two laps later when the four leading cars swept into the pits together to change tires and refuel. Von Brauchitsch was first away in 47 seconds, Carac-ciola followed him out moments later, and the Auto Union mechanics had Rosemeyer back in the race in 75 seconds.

But all hell had broken loose in the Alfa pits. Italians were falling over each other and Nuvolari stood beside his car gulp-ing mineral water and screaming with rage. The pipe to the fuel-pressure pump was blocked and the gas had to be poured by hand. It took 2 min-utes and 14 seconds, and Nuvolari rejoined the race in sixth place. At the end of the lap he was second. Stuck, Fagioli, Caracciola, and Rosemeyer all held their breath as his red Alfa ripped past them and disappeared down the winding road. Von Brauchitsch had a 70-second lead, but Neubauer ordered him to speed up and keep away from the lunatic Italian. The young Prussian replied with a new lap record of 10 minutes and 30 seconds, and added 16 seconds to his lead before Nuvolari came past his pit and got the "Faster" sign. Von Brauchitsch was driving far beyond himself and making an heroic effort, but he had nothing of the genius of the man he was racing with. He was a workmanlike driver. His style was heavy and under real pressure it became ragged. Coming into a corner his arms flailed, his wheels locked up. And he was under real pressure from Nuvolari now. With two laps to go his lead was cut to 32 seconds, but what was worse, the white breaker strip was showing on the Mercedes' right front tire, which meant the tread was worn out. As von Brauchitsch started the last lap he waved frantically at the tire. As far as Neubauer was concerned, there was no alter-native but to wave him on. The tire let go six miles from the finish. He was coming out of a corner, accelerating hard, when it happened. The big Mercedes slewed sideways, and as von Brauch-itsch brought it back under control the red Alfa passed him in a blur. He ground home on the rim, Stuck's Auto Union, Caracciola, and then Rosemeyer passing him on the way. The Germans had no record of the Italian national anthem on hand, but Nuvolari always carried one with him. As Korpsfiihrer Hiihnlein stood listening to the sound of the Marcia Reale, he must have been grateful that the Fiihrer had not shown up for the race. Within minutes the news was broken in Europe, England, and America. That skinny, smiling, horsefaced underdog Italian had cocked his leg in the German kennel. In Italy the people took to the streets and in England the press called it an historic triumph of man over machine. The victory was the only one for a non-German car in grand-prix racing that season. For two more years Nuvolari held on, fighting a desperate rear-guard action for Alfa and Ferrari. In 1936, Chiron left the team to join Mercedes and Jano produced a fully independently sprung Alfa (the 12C 36/37) with a 4-litre V-12 and a tubular chassis. It was never a match for the German cars. By 1937 Mercedes had developed the W25 into the W125, a 200-mph machine with a 5.6-litre straight-eight producing 646 hp at 5,800 rpm, and Auto Union had come out with the 520 hp C-type. Nuvolari performed the occasional miracle and won, but for the most part his in-credible talent was squandered. Porsche wooed him long and hard, and, finally, after Rosemeyer was killed in a foolhardy speed-record attempt on the Frankfurt autobahn in the spring of 1938, and Varzi had become addicted to morphine and temporarily dropped out of racing, Nuvolari joined Auto Union. On September 3, 1939, he won his last grand prix, in Belgrade.

Two days earlier, Hitler had invaded Poland. There will never be a greater racing driver than Tazio Nuvolari. He won more grandes epreuves than any other driver between the wars, but that in itself is as unimportant as how he would have stood up against Boillot, Fangio, Moss, Clark, or Jackie Stewart. Nuvolari was a chaplinesque figure. His diminutive size and social awkwardness contrasted absurdly with his gallantry, humor, skill, and perseverance as a competitor. The triumphs of his life affected him outwardly as little as the tragedies and there was an immensity of both. Mercifully, he wasn't in-human, as the lottery race at Tripoli proved. (Like his contemporaries, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence despite being endowed with a greatness which would have earned him millions had he been racing today.) But he was passion-ately loyal to his wife and family and friends. Above all he lived at the height of the machine age, when racing cars—and not jets or rockets—were the popular symbol of speed and courage. No matter what or where he drove, people were exalted by his mastery. Tazio Nuvolari was an intimate, universal hero in the age of such heroes and no mere racing driver can ever achieve that status again.