The Greatest Champion – Rudolf Caraccoia

Crowned in glory yet shadowed by tragedy, Rudolf Caracciola left an
indelible mark on the history of motorsports when he raced for Mercedes-Benz

Text Graham Robson

Imaged courtesy Daimler Archive

Anybody who is interested in racing history has heard the name of Rudi Caracciola, but why is that name important? There are many legends about the man, but I can suggest two facts that distinguish him: He was a talented driver for Mercedes-Benz for nearly 30 years, longer than any other driver was – or is ever likely to be – and he overcame significant tragedies during his life time in order to do so.

Otto Wilhelm Rudolf Caracciola was born in 1901, the fourth son of Maximilian and Mathilde Caracciola who ran a hotel in Remagen, Germany, on the Rhine River between Bonn and Koblenz. There was money, but not a surplus; the young “Caratsch” (as eventually dubbed by the German public) or just “Rudi” to his colleagues, might have grown up with an interest in motorsport, but had to start modestly by racing an NSU motorcycle.

Having obtained his driver’s license before he was 18 (but never having to serve in WWI, which ended in 1918), he then became an apprentice at the Fafnir auto-manufacturing company in Aachen, a company that would be out of business by 1926.

Early racing career

Caracciola started his racing career by winning several motorcycle events on his NSU. Later, while still employed at Fafnir, he used a works car to win races at AVUS in Berlin and at Rüsselsheim. In due course, he moved to Dresden, tried his hand as a Fafnir sales representative, and was soon hired by Daimler to sell cars from its Dresden branch. This was how his link with the Stuttgart company was founded, a connection that would last for 30 years.

Almost at once he began to follow his dream of becoming a world-famous figure in racecar driving. Although details aren’t known, Caracciola seems to have become a works driver – or at least works-supported – within months. In 1923, he won four races in a 6/25/40 model, following that up a year later with 15 victories in the latest supercharged model, and was clearly under consideration as a regular team driver. His plans to study mechanical engineering were abandoned forever then and there.

No sooner had the Daimler-Benz merger taken place in 1926 than Caracciola began lobbying for a place on the Grand Prix team. He must have used a silver tongue in his negotiations, for he left the meeting with the promise of an on-loan old-type 2-liter, 8-cylinder M218, in which he entered the new German GP as an “independent” driver. The fairytale blossomed at once.

Triumph

In this race, held on the AVUS track in July, he stalled his engine at the start, spent ages fighting his way back through the field, reveled in the rainy conditions, and won the race outright. Caracciola immediately became known as the Regenmeister, or Rainmaster, for his uncanny ability in wet conditions. No less importantly, he won the substantial sum of 17,000 Reichsmarks. That was enough to finance the opening of a soon-prestigious Daimler-Benz dealership in Berlin – and to marry his beloved fiancée Charlotte.

Profits from the thriving new dealership were certainly not enough for him to finance a suitable lifestyle (the dealership did, in fact, go bankrupt in 1930 as the Great Depression deepened), but his race winnings in the golden years that followed were certainly substantial. In the same way that Germany’s Michael Schumacher later became the standard against which every other race driver was compared in the 1990s, Caracciola became the standard by which everyone measured themselves in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Not only was Caracciola rapidly becoming the highest-rated race driver of the period, he made sure that he always looked good into the bargain. The immaculate overalls (not flame-proofed – but no one knew about such materials in those days) were matched by his immaculate way of dressing, which included the smooth, swept-back hairstyle by which he was always recognized.

Caracciola impressed the motorsports world not only by the sheer number of races that he contested between 1927 and 1930, but also by the number of blue-ribbon victories he earned, all of them in one of the Ferdinand Porsche-designed S/SS/SSK supercharged Mercedes-Benz cars. No one could gainsay a man who won the 1928 German GP (SS), the 1929 British RAC Tourist Trophy (SSK) and the Irish GP in Southern Ireland (SSK); only sheer misfortune and a botched fuel stop mid-race caused him to drop from the lead to third place in the inaugural 1929 Monaco GP.

He also won four hill-climb events in 1930 to win the European Hill Climb Championship, a feat he repeated a year later, this time in a factory-provided SSKL. Although Daimler-Benz withdrew from motorsports in 1931 in response to the global economic downturn, behind-the-scenes support enabled him to win the German GP in the wet conditions he favored, as well as achieving an acclaimed victory in the Mille Miglia in Italy, both in the SSKL.

Then followed two difficult motor racing seasons – 1932 and 1933, when with no money to spare, Mercedes-Benz was completely out of motor racing. Caracciola was at loose ends, though he was kept at an arm’s-length contract that requested him to return to drive for the Stuttgart team as soon as times changed. Those were the years in which he raced for the Italian Alfa Romeo team, sometimes without total backing from a chauvinistic team management, but still with enough guts, and mechanical reliability, to win two Grands Prix, and the European Hill Climb Championship for the third time.

Tragedy

Calamity struck during the 1933 Monaco Grand Prix, casting a shadow over Caracciola for the rest of his career. In practice in an Alfa Romeo 8C, with race driver Louis Chiron alongside, Caracciola lost control at the Tabac corner; his Alfa hit the wall and Caracciola was seriously injured. The result was a badly smashed up right leg requiring many months of recovery. Out of racing for the rest of the season, the German champion had to come to grips with the fact that he would be faced with a right leg that was a full two inches shorter and he would be in pain for the rest of his life. As if those challenges weren’t bad enough, Caracciola lost his beloved wife Charlotte when she was caught up in an avalanche while skiing in the Swiss Alps.
Depressed and in financial straits, Caracciola was ready to withdraw from motorsports. With Adolf Hitler gaining power, there was public money for German companies to return to motor racing in 1934. Daimler-Benz team boss Alfred Neubauer hastened to sign him up to drive the fantastic newly designed “Silver Arrows” (W25s first, W154s to follow) and, effectively, to be team leader as well.

Although it took time for Caracciola to be fit and competitive once again, he made it; his biggest battle was with the egos of his teammates, Manfred Von Brauchitsch and the fiery Italian Luigi Fagioli. Both were famous and fast; and both wanted to be seen as the best of the best. Despite Neubauer’s towering personality and the team orders he sometimes imposed, Caracciola led at times but won no races in 1934.

Champion

In 1935, Caracciola’s fortunes recovered: He won five Grands Prix and was therefore acclaimed as European Drivers Champion. Von Brauchitsch accepted this as the highborn German aristocrat that he was; Fagioli stormed and complained (especially as he could not come to terms with the uncompetitive W25s of the 1936 season), and departed to his native Italy to join Alfa Romeo for the next season.

In the 1937 and 1938 seasons, Caracciola was once again the supreme personality in the three-pointed-star’s firmament, winning four races in 1937 (W125) and two in 1938 (W154). Not only that, but he once again became European Drivers Champion in both those years, breaking speed records in a series of specially built single-seaters. He also married again, to Alice Hoffman-Trobeck, with whom he had been close for some time.

Then in 1939, Caracciola’s star slowly began to fade. Still competitive in the V-12 W154 GP cars, he was gradually overwhelmed by Hermann Lang, the driver who rose from the rank of race mechanic to become the fastest of the bunch. Caracciola raged about this – there might have been a touch of jealousy as well as professional pride: He eventually wrote to Daimler-Benz CEO Dr. Wilhelm Kissel:
“Starting with Herr Sailer [the head of the racing division] through Neubauer, down to the mechanics, there is an obsession with Lang … almost all the mechanics and engine specialists in the racing division are on Lang’s side.”

If Hitler had not marched into Poland in September 1939, a crisis might have developed in the works team, for there is no doubt that Caracciola felt slighted by what was happening. He retreated to his family’s home in Lugano, Switzerland, and put all that behind him. As a non-combatant, he took no part in the fighting that followed, and his membership in the NSKK (The National Socialist Motor Corps) into which all German race drivers were encouraged to enroll, no longer impinged on his life – or his prospects.

Wartime exile

For six years, he and Alice lived in a twilight world of Swiss neutrality, though surrounded by fighting nations. His racing-contract pension was even honored until 1942 – when Hitler’s Nazis canceled that, after which he had to make do on his own capital – retained from racing victories. When the war ended in 1945, Caracciola was only 44 years old, once again looking for excitement in his life.

Caracciola’s postwar story has been told often enough not to need embellishment. In summary, he spent much time during the war trying to arrange for the 1.5-liter W165 single-seaters to be delivered to him in Switzerland “for safe keeping,” and for him to eventually start racing again when the war was over. Until 1945, the cars were held by the government and stored near Dresden, miraculously undamaged by bombing, but when the racecars were eventually transported to Switzerland, authorities immediately impounded them as German property.

Postwar trials

An invitation to bring a car over to the United States for the Indianapolis 500 race of 1946 was thwarted by the same authorities; the cars and their travails remained unresolved until the 1950s, well after Caracciola’s involvement had ceased. In the meantime, however, Caracciola had traveled to Indianapolis to test drive a Thorn Engineering Special, but was hit in the face by an unknown object during the test drive, causing him to lose control, smash into a wall and suffer a severe concussion.

Recovering from the accident, Caracciola recuperated for months as the houseguest of Indy owner Bill Hulman. They became such good friends, Caracciola later willed his Grand Prix racing trophies to Hulman.  

With the Rainmaster still in poor health much of the time, racing was not possible and finances were tight. Somehow, the family kept going for several years until Daimler-Benz returned to motor racing in 1952. Remembering his old hero, Neubauer offered Caracciola a place in the works team to race the new-fangled 300SLs.

Unhappily, this seemingly fortunate arrangement was to last for just two races. In the Swiss GP, Caracciola crashed one of the cars, breaking his leg once again. At this point, there would be no further recovery; his racing career was finally over for good.

 Nevertheless, Mercedes-Benz still retained a great deal of loyalty to a personality who brought the company much success in the earlier years, and speedily arranged for him to become its brand ambassador in one specific field: Boosting sales of the postwar cars to NATO troops (mainly American) still stationed in Germany. Caracciola’s team organized shows, demonstrations and driving days all over Europe, as well as arranging for newly ordered cars to be delivered personally to the clients in Europe, or organize shipment overseas.
It was not necessarily an ideal way to make a living in middle age, but was much better than living in penury, forgotten by the world of motoring. Still well respected whenever and wherever he appeared, Caracciola was able to enjoy – if not contribute to – the W196 successes of 1954 and 1955. At age 58, Caracciola died of liver failure in 1959.

But memories of his many successes remain very much alive: To this day, the Grand Prix trophies he willed to Hulman are on display in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.

 At the 1938 Swiss Grand Prix, Rudi Caracciola beams after driving his W154 to victory in the pouring rain.

Caracciola and his second wife, Alice, at their home in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1937.

The “Rainmaster” Rudi Caracciola wins a drenched 1936 Monaco Grand Prix in a Mercedes-Benz W25.

 Mercedes-Benz racing director Alfred Neubauer and Caracciola, attended by Caracciola’s dog, Moritz.AVUS-Rennen, Berlin, 1937:

In a striking image, Caracciola – driving stream-lined W125 No. 35 – overtakes his great rival, Bernd Rosemeyer in Auto Union No. 31, on the brick banking of this dangerous circuit. Bookends to a career:

Autographed by the winner, this formal portrait taken in front of the Daimler-Benz branch in Berlin-Charlottenburg commemorates one of a string of early victories Caracciola won for the company:

More than 20 years later at the May 1952 Swiss Grand Prix, Caracciola sits behind the wheel of a W194 300SL. He later crashed, hit a tree and broke his leg – yet again – bringing an end to a long and glorious career.