Blitzen Benz at Brooklands

Thinking about those giant cars which enlivened racing both before and after WWI reminds me of when I was at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart in 1961…

When I saw the Blitzen Benz at the museum I asked if I could have its bonnet opened, whereupon I noted that its engine number was not that of the LG ‘Cupid’ Hornsted car. (I knew this from the BARC’s records, important books that were signed by the timekeepers and the Track’s Clerk of the Course, then Col Lindsay Lloyd, and accepted by the FIA as being authentic.)

In 1922, Dunne of the British Benz Company entered a Blitzen for races at the Surrey Track, appointing as its driver the flamboyant Horace Barlow. The car was the one driven to an LSR of 124.10mph by Hornsted in 1914 at Brooklands – and to a second and third at the Easter Meeting – but it was now announced as a ‘hush-hush new Benz’. Its livery had been changed to German white and the radiator given the sharp beak of the German eagle.

Sadly, the car was badly damaged when John Duff went over the top of the banking in 1922, and it was returned to the Mannheim factory.

By the 1950s, however, appropriate cars were being sought for the M-B Museum…

With hindsight, I suppose if you make a replica it is permissible to give it the engine number worn for a top performance, which was that of the Blitzen Benz timed at 142.86mph in America, a record not recognised in Europe. Asked how he did this the driver, Bob Burman, is reputed to have said, “Oh, we waited at Daytona until the sea had gone out and the beach had shrunk, reducing the timed distance!” Joking perhaps, but underlining why the FIA at that time did not recognise such bids.

When some two years later I again visited the M-B Museum, the engine was now on a display stand beside the car and, lo, its number was now that of the ‘Hornsted’ Benz…

Major R F Cooper presumably bought the other big Benz, the ex-Hémery one, after the war from the Mannheim factory, to where it had been returned just before hostilities had broken out. Unless it had been overhauled it must have been worn out after its long career and its unofficial LSR of 141.37mph in the USA; no wonder, after a few Brooklands races, that Cooper’s friend Count Zborowski scrapped it as dangerous!