“You were there. In Brno, the Grand Prix three years ago.”
“Oh,” I said. I had no memory of her being at the Czechoslovakian Grand Prix that year—but at a race, I had no eyes for anything but the cars.
“You?” she said, swallowing. “When did you meet him?”
“Oh, that same year—but earlier. When he came to try out as a test driver.” I smiled despite myself. “Did he ever tell you about it? All the others came wearing overalls, but Bernie came to drive in his best suit. When the director asked him why, he said he thought it was an important occasion—he should wear the best thing he had.”
This time the sound she made was much less a laugh.
“No, he didn’t tell me. But he wouldn’t, you know; he didn’t ever look back—” The last of the word vanished with a small gulp.
She wasn’t the kind of woman to whom you would offer gestures of affection without a specific invitation, but I was old enough to be her father, and while my grief could never equal hers, she knew it was genuine. I made a slight reaching motion—she turned slightly toward me—and then she came into my arms and I felt the heat of her face and her tears through my shirt. I patted her back, very gingerly. I could feel her breasts against me too; very large and hard with milk, and for the first time I remembered that she had a baby, no more than two months old.
That made my own eyes sting. The badness of the loss and the thought that at least there was that much left of Bernie—he’d told me they called the baby Bernd Jr.
Neither one of us was the sort to weep in public, though, and she stepped back, turning her face away.
“Let’s look,” she said.
It was obvious what had caused the wreck—impact with the central pillar of a concrete bridge (what in God’s name had made them choose a run with a bridge in it?). Much less obvious was what had caused Bernie to lose control and crash into it.
Elly was an aviatrix; she understood airflow, and together we knelt and turned things over, tracing crumpled metal with our fingers, murmuring possibilities.
“Turbulence?” she said at one point, lifting the edge of the side panel. “I read one account that speculated that it was turbulence caused by the forest. ‘Turbulence is unpredictable in a forest,’” she quoted. “‘The racecourse ran through dense forest on either side.’ A Venturi effect?”
I creased my brow at that and looked at the wreckage, but reluctantly shook my head.
“I can’t see how that could be. I haven’t seen the course, but I’ve seen woodland. Too much irregularity—and to develop such an effect in a run of less than ten seconds?”
“Ridiculous,” she agreed. “But speaking of airflow—it has to have been that, don’t you think?” She spoke with complete confidence, not admitting any possibility that Bernie could have failed in any way.
If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here, I thought, but I obligingly got up and came to kneel beside her over a round steel plate—the air-intake regulator. It was battered, a little bent. There were seven air-intake ports, as I’d specified in my design notes—but all of them had been welded shut.
“That would be a lot of help,” I muttered. “Do you see the foot pedal?”
“Over there, I think. Is this it?” She reached and handed it to me. They hadn’t shortened it, but that didn’t matter, as with the intake ports all permanently closed, the driver couldn’t regulate the airflow with the pedal anyway. Was this evidence of some tampering, though? I didn’t see how it could be—the ports had been sealed with a welding torch; a solid, professional job. No one could have abstracted the plate, made that alteration, and put it back without someone on the crew—probably everyone—noticing. And there were plausible reasons why Auto Union might have done that, depending on the results of their own wind-tunnel tests.
It was getting dark outside, and the sighs of the two men near the door were becoming louder. At last we got to our feet and stood, not wanting simply to walk away.
“I’ll speak to some people,” I said. “At Auto Union.”
She nodded. “So will I. I know the crew; they’ll talk to me.”
We shook hands, very formally, and I walked behind her, away from the wreckage.
Design Note 43.21: Heat Shield
The heat shield is to be placed behind the cockpit, between the driver and the rear axles, which support the ice tank and the fuel tank. Height, 1.1 m, width .87 m. Insulated construction, multiple layers of wood and felt.
Workshop ref. 209/13.
Bernd grew up on a motorcycle. I always thought that’s what made him such a good race driver: he didn’t have any sort of preconception as to what a car could do or what the limits might be.