1938 and 1939 Auto Union Type D Grand Prix Racers.
This summer, Audi filled a gaping hole in their historical collection when they acquired a twin-supercharged V-12 powered 1939 Type D grand prix car that represented the pinnacle of Auto Union performance before the war.
Long in private hands and the recipient of technical assistance from Audi during its 1990s restoration, the mid-engined Type D will now sit in its rightful place in the Audi museum in Ingolstadt.
1939 Auto Union Type D Grand Prix racer. Photos courtesy of Audi AG.
When World War II started on September 1, 1939, Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz were the class of the European Grand Prix racing circuit. Although the great Tazio Nuvolari managed to squeeze out a few improbable wins for the Scuderia Ferrari Alfa Romeo team in the mid-1930s, the Germans, whose cars were dubbed the Silver Arrows, absolutely dominated the scene. The last race of the era actually occurred on September 3, 1939, two days after Germany had already invaded Poland, when a 46-year-old Nuvolari won the Belgrade Grand Prix in an Auto Union Type D. The power and speed of the Silver Arrows would not be topped in grand prix racing until the turbo era dawned decades later.
While Mercedes-Benz was able to squirrel away their famous racing machines as Stuttgart fell into the Allied occupation zone, Auto Union was not so lucky as their headquarters in Zwickau fell under Soviet Control. The Soviets found the Auto Union racers, which had been safely tucked away in a mine building above ground, and seized them as war reparations and they vanished into the vast, well, vastness of the closed, communist state.
1939 Auto Union Type D Grand Prix racer.
With rumors of the car’s existence and whereabouts at a low static buzz in the 1970s, a Serbian-born American of Russian heritage, Paul Karassik, began his search for the cars. It took 10 years and he found just basket cases missing their bodywork, but Karassik managed to rescue enough parts to build two cars, one of which was restored as the twin-supercharged 1939 Type D and the other restored as a single-supercharged 1938 Type D.
The grand prix formula in the late 1930s specified a maximum 3.0 liters of engine displacement with supercharging or 4.5 liters without. The formula also called for a sliding weight scale from 400kg to 850kg. Top speeds with the right gearing were in the 200 MPH range and streamlined, modified versions of both Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz grand prix racers were built for speed record drives. Though neither company ever set the outright land speed record, they leapfrogged each other repeatedly, sometimes on the same day on the same course.
1939 Auto Union Type D Grand Prix racer.
The 485-hp, 3.0-liter V-12 engine featured an exhaust camshaft on each bank of cylinders and a single, central cam in the vee for the intake valve operation as well as four carburetors. While Mercedes-Benz was clearly the class of 1939, with Herman Lang winning five of eight events and his teammate Rudolf Caracciola another, Auto Union did win two races: Nuvolari’s victory in Belgrade and H.P. Muller’s triumph at the French Grand Prix.
This car drew a fair bit of controversy a few years back when Christie’s pulled it from a major auction, at a time when it was believed it could set a record for any car sold at auction. The controversy was that the car was at first presented as the actual car driven by Muller to win the French Grand Prix, but further research indicated that the serial numbers didn’t match up. Auto Union ran 11 D-types during the 1939 season and the cars were frequently stripped down and rebuilt after each race, the parts from one machine possibly cross-pollinating to another, so saying any one car was definitively driven at a certain event is next to impossible. On top of that confusion, the parts Karassik recovered from the Soviet Union were from multiple cars and it was decided, after the parts were collected and inventoried, to build the two cars. The current consensus is that the car purchased by Audi is chassis number 19 and was driven by Hans Stuck to a sixth place finish at the 1939 French Grand Prix.
