Only two eyewitnesses? I doubted that very much. A record run was not a race, so there wouldn’t have been a crowd, but surely there would have been a good number of people present. The car’s crew, naturally—although they wouldn’t have been at the end of the course, they would have seen something. A crew chief and the eight mechanics of a race crew, certainly. Maybe a backup driver. Officials from Auto Union, definitely. Which men would those have been? I wondered. Again—probably not located near the actual crash, but every eye would have been fixed on that car for every second of the run.
I’d read the two “official” eyewitness accounts in the newspapers: Otto Geyer and Carlo Weidmann. I’d talked to many newspaper journalists on many occasions. I had yet to read a single interview of myself without errors, and certainly never one that included everything I’d said. I didn’t know Geyer, but I’d met Weidmann a few times. I pulled out my watch; nearly 3:00 p.m. Perhaps Carlo Weidmann would like to have a cup of coffee. Perhaps mit schnapps—it was a cold day, after all.
Design Note 55.12 Fairings
Fairings to be adjusted so that junction with side-paneling is minimal, ideally less than 2 mm. Fairings to be tapered, with a thickness of five cm at the apex of each fairing, tapering outward to 8 cm at point of attachment. Attachment: bolts at intervals of 15 cm.
See Workshop Order 143/7 for bolt sizing.
“Oh my God.” Weidmann took a large swallow of his drink—he’d chosen calvados to accompany his coffee—and coughed hard. “Oh God. You know how it is when there’s a bad wreck, you know it occurs so fast, you can’t have seen anything, really, and at the same time it seems to move so slowly, like it’s—it’s happening like an ordinary thing, just in its own time, but it’s you that’s frozen, so slow that you can’t do anything?”
I did know, and nodded. The heat of the coffee was making my nose run; I dabbed it with my napkin.
“The car did skid, though? You saw it?”
“Oh yes.” He’d flushed from the coughing but now went a little pale. “Yes, definitely. It was just before the Morfelden clearing—before the bridge, you know? That bridge...He moved to the right, there, I’m sure of it—maybe because of the wind that was coming from the right—but the car’s left wheels, they went off the concrete, into the grass of the median.” He glanced at me. “We’re sure of that; the wheel marks were plain in the grass, when we looked...afterward.”
He reached for the calvados.
“A good half meter into the grass. I saw the skid and thought, Oh God but still hoped he’d pull out.” He took a drink. “At that point, the bridge was only four hundred meters or so away. He knew, he saw, he was doing anything he could to try to save himself, countersteering, braking—there were marks—trying to aim through the bridge.”
He stopped and pressed his lips hard together.
“He didn’t make it,” I finished for him, quietly. He shook his head and drained his glass.
“So young,” he whispered.
Design Note 22.3—Air intake plate [Dr. Porsche]
The air intake vents should be increased from three to seven, and the foot pedal shortened and rotated approximately five degrees in a clockwise direction for quicker response. Maintain present size of plate until further measurement. [See further note for discussion of spring.]
I couldn’t find Otto Geyer; he’d gone to Munich, I was told, to visit relatives. But in the process of looking for him, I discovered that the pieces of the wreck had been taken to a garage in Darmstadt, close to where the accident had happened.
I drove there, filled with equal parts dread and curiosity. When I introduced myself, the proprietor of the garage raised his eyebrows in respect and ushered me at once to the end bay, its sliding door discreetly closed and fastened with a padlock.
“Here, Herr Doktor Porsche,” he said, beckoning me to the side of the building, where a door gave access. “The lady came just a little while ago.”
“The lady?”
“Frau Rosemeyer, ja,” he said, and opened the door for me.
The last thing I had expected was to meet the grieving widow over what was, in effect, Bernd’s coffin, and I entered with some diffidence. Elly Beinhorn—she seldom called herself Frau Rosemeyer—turned when I came in, her eyebrows raising with surprise.
“Ferdinand,” she said. Then she smiled, a little sadly. “Of course—you would need to see it too.” She stepped back, a hand sweeping low to invite me to look at what lay on the stained concrete under the glare of a big work light overhead.
“It” was what was left of the 6.5 L 1938 Stromlinienwagen. Or the “Death Car,” as the newspapers all too accurately called it. There was no visible blood, but the crumpled metal and exploded tires bore eloquent witness to that accuracy.
The Streamliner’s dismembered parts were laid out on the ground like sections of a slaughtered, crudely butchered beast. The garage smelled of racing fuel. I loved that smell, but now I imagined the scent of blood mixed in and started to take shallow breaths.
Elly came up bravely to my side but then faltered a little, not quite reaching for my arm.
“I—I don’t think...”
I took her hand and tucked it into the crook of my elbow.
“It’s all right,” I said. “He didn’t die in the car, you know.”
She’d been holding her breath; she let it go with a sigh like a punctured inner tube.