The White Attack

White as the colour of attack. Not silver – that came much later. When motor racing assigned its national colours, Germany was given white, France blue and England green. Racing colours that were taken just as seriously back then as the national team’s kits are today. And just like that – white and imposing – three racing cars from Untertürkheim and Mannheim lined up on the starting grid in the summer of 1908. The Grand Prix de l’ACF in Dieppe was the most prestigious race in the world, even if no one called it that at the time. There was no world championship or racing calendar as we know them today; having emerged from the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1906, it had, within a few years, blossomed into the great showdown between the industrialised nations. The car featured on these pages dates from that year, representing an entire model and a history that is greater than itself.

Normandy, 7 July 1908. At six o’clock in the morning, 48 cars set off at one-minute intervals, setting off so early that even the slowest will still reach the finish line before nightfall. Ahead of them lie ten laps, each just under 77 kilometres long, totalling 769.889 kilometres: cobblestones, gravel, and swirling tar dust that stings the eyes and burns the lungs. Not exactly a Sunday jaunt. After the race, all the drivers and mechanics have to have their eyes treated; one driver is hit in the eye by a stone that has been flung up; he carries on driving, half-blind, to finish in second place. Henri Cissac’s car loses a tyre and rolls over. It is the first fatal accident in Grand Prix history: Cissac dies along with his mechanic, Jules Schaube, who is sitting next to him. There is no dedicated safety department yet. Back then, drivers and mechanics were not separate worlds. It was a time when driving, tinkering and inventing still went hand in hand. If you want to be fast, you have to understand your machine.

There is a lot at stake for the French. Renault had won in 1906, but Fiat had already won in 1907. And now this. At first, it looks like a lively back-and-forth: Willy Pöge pulls away early on, his Mercedes colleague Otto Salzer sets the fastest lap at a daring 126.5 km/h, and in between, a French driver briefly pushes his way to the front. But on the fifth of ten laps, Christian Lautenschlager’s Mercedes takes the lead and doesn’t relinquish it. In the process, he wears out 22 tyres, stops ten times – both in the pits and at the side of the road – and, after just under seven hours, crosses the line first with an average speed of 111.1 km/h, almost nine minutes ahead of the runner-up, a Benz. Third place: another Mercedes. Of the seven best-placed cars, only one bore a French badge; the other six were from Germany. The shock ran deep. The following year, there were no longer enough car manufacturers to field a field for the Grand Prix. The race was suspended for three years.

The winner? Not some grand seigneur with a curled moustache. A travelling Swabian locksmith, brought to Untertürkheim by Gottlieb Daimler in 1899 to work as a mechanic, and promoted by Wilhelm Maybach in 1905 to foreman of the vehicle department: Christian Lautenschlager, fearless yet level-headed, and endowed with that healthy lifestyle and that down-to-earth business acumen which Swabians are often said to possess.

He was promised 49,000 francs should he win. In today’s purchasing power, that’s roughly one million euros, or alternatively fourteen kilograms of gold. A thrifty Swabian who, of all things, hits the jackpot in the world’s most expensive game – you could hardly ask for a better punchline. And because he was forward-thinking, he’d devised a system: always one tyre at the front, two at the back as a reserve on board, dutifully replenished at every pit stop. He won. Sitting beside him was the on-board mechanic Jakob Meckle.

Six years later, Lautenschlager was to win the Grand Prix once more. Again in a Mercedes, this time in Lyon, at the last major race before the war.

There is one thing, however, that you should know when standing in front of a car like this: it was never a production model with a fixed chassis number, nor was it a vehicle with a clear, unbroken identity, as we know it from road cars. Factory racing cars were not registered. They were simply put into service. And in the process, they were constantly modified. They were built, they crashed, they were rebuilt; the wheelbase was shortened, axles were swapped, bodywork and entire engines were changed, from race to race, precisely because of the crashes and accidents. With these machines, transformation was the essence, never the exception. A racing car of that era is not an object with a stamp. It is a verb, defined not by a number, but solely by what it has done. Anyone who brings it back to life today using original parts and findings handed down through the generations does not betray its nature. They understand it and carry it forward.

Whatever has survived of this car remains as it is. Where time has left gaps, another process begins: drawings, photographs, measurements, materials, traces of workmanship, and parts that have been passed down. One interprets the car and its history as if reading a medical report. Missing elements are only supplemented once a reliable answer emerges from what is already present, true to the original, using materials, techniques and craftsmanship that follow the historical model. Do not remake what is allowed to remain old. Do not invent what can be ascertained.

This ensures that no arbitrary replica of the 1908 model is produced. The new serves the old, not the other way round. As much of the historical substance as possible is retained, and where additions are necessary, they are made with respect for what has survived. Perhaps this is the wisest way to allow such a racing car to retain its history. It is not forced back to a supposedly perfect moment in its past. One allows a machine to have a biography – one with breaks, changes, losses and additions – and recognises that good restoration does not erase this biography. In this way, one takes all its eras seriously. But a racing car was never meant to stand still anyway.

It all began with a love of competition, the ambition to be faster and smarter than the others. These people lay awake at night because they wanted to know whether what had seemed impossible yesterday would work tomorrow. Much of their world has disappeared. But not that joy.

It’s still going strong.

→ You can read this and other stories in the new ramp #71 “Yabba Dabba Doo!”

(now avalaible in German)