The Jewish Race-Car Driver Who Outpaced the Nazis

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/books/review/faster-neal-bascomb.html

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FASTERHow a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s BestBy Neal Bascomb

The 20th century ended much faster than it started. In 1900, no human being had ever traveled 100 miles per hour — except, perhaps, during a very long fall, which could not have ended well. By 2000, trains more than tripled that speed, a jet-powered car had broken the sound barrier and the Apollo spacecraft had seen the far side of 24,000 m.p.h.

The story of the speed revolution is long and complicated, but many of its parts are amenable to heroic narration: Brash risk-takers, mostly men, compete for and against corporations and governments; money is spent and lives are lost; champions rise and barriers fall; technology advances. Grandeur and grandiosity abound. It makes for the kind of history movie producers love.

Neal Bascomb’s new book, “Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best,” is this kind of history. It’s also, as its subtitle makes clear, an underdog story. The Jewish driver, René Dreyfus, is a Max Baer of the asphalt, Jesse Owens on wheels. A skinny Niçois, Dreyfus raced the Grand Prix circuit for several teams before landing, in 1937, on Écurie Bleue, an upstart sponsored by the American heiress Lucy Schell, an accomplished driver in her own right and the book’s most interesting character. Hitler’s best are the cars and drivers of Mercedes and Auto Union, chiefly Rudi Caracciola, a German who won three European championships between 1935 and 1938.

[ Read an excerpt from “Faster.” ]

Like many of the cars that race through it, “Faster” adheres to a formula and keeps a brisk pace. After early successes, Dreyfus and Caracciolla both suffer serious crashes, and Schell trades rally-driving for team-building. Other racers, friends and rivals, die on the tracks. Hitler, looking to boost Germany’s morale and prime its war machine, pumps money into the auto industry, whose burnished-aluminum marvels, the so-called Silver Arrows, stun Europe and transform the sport.

Caracciola fights back from his injuries, and the Reich rallies around him, but Dreyfus finds himself on the outs — a Frenchman in a sport dominated by Italian and German teams less and less hospitable to non-natives, especially those with famously Jewish last names. Schell recruits Dreyfus to her fledgling team and puts him behind the wheel of its new car, the Delahaye 145. Germany annexes Austria, and Dreyfus, sensing the moment, drives the Delahaye to a shocking upset of Caracciola and Mercedes in the opening race of the 1938 season.

If the outline feels familiar, the story itself is fresh, and told in vivid detail. Bascomb’s research — in racing periodicals in several languages and archival collections on multiple continents — is to be applauded. He describes the twists and turns of the 1930s Grand Prix races as if he’d driven the courses himself. And he organizes his material thoughtfully. Rather than introduce Dreyfus with an account of his first Grand Prix win, in Monaco in 1930, Bascomb describes his strong showing in a less renowned but more symbolically charged race, the climb at La Turbie in 1926: From the moment we meet our hero, he’s fighting an uphill battle.

Though Bascomb focuses on the Grand Prix, he takes in all sorts of competitions, from rallies and climbs to trials, which are at least as exciting to read about as the more famous races. And there are some worthwhile detours — into the early history of automotive manufacturing, the fascist obsession with fast cars and Hitler’s plans to motorize Germany’s civilians as well as its military. These digressions are absorbing but all too brief, as Bascomb hurries to the next starting line. By my rough count, the book features close to 50 race scenes and summaries. For me, this was too much — I wished that “Faster” were slower — but your mileage may vary.