I had the extraordinary experience of living in
West Berlin in the mid sixties. That was when I
learned that gear heads will do anything to feed
their need for speed. There was a stretch of
autobahn that went from the "wall" in the
northern sector, almost straight as an arrow, for
21 miles (might have been 21 Km), to the "wall"
in the southern sector.
Sunday was race day! I used to take my wife and
young son out near where the autobahn went past a
lake (The Wannsea (sp)) and through a park-like
area. We would set up a picnic blanket with
hundreds of other "spectators" and watch for
several hours. All sorts of exotic cars, many
looking like refugees from a road race course,
would come screaming by with open pipes, some
singles, some two by two, and sometimes three or
four in a cluster. Piloting the cars were
fanatical Frenchmen, Germans, Brits, and
Americans. They would race at full speed for the
entire length of the autobahn, then turn around
at the last exit before the wall, and race back
the other way. Talk about "full song". I rember
hearing four and five cars at a time coming into
earshot and passing out the other side at wide
open throttle! This went on all day long. It was
a great experience. Ferarris, Maseraties,
Porsches, open wheel racers like Lotus and BRM,
Iso Rivoltas, Corvettes, Shelby Cobras, a 427
Ford Fairlane that I still clearly remember, all
racing back and forth all day long. There were
motorcycles too. Superchared BMW 500s, Nortons,
BSA Gold Stars, WR and KR Harleys. It was like a
major car and bike event. This was not an
organized event, it was just where the "trapped"
citizen gearheads of West Berlin would go on
Sunday to keep from getting cabin fever. It
inspired me to buy a Porsche Super 90, then to
buy a Devin "D" and swap the motor from the
Porsche into the tiny fiberglass wonder. By the
time I left West Berlin and moved to Munich, I
was severely infected with Germany's brand of
speed fever. It was the dead of winter before I
could get time off to go and retrieve the little
open car and bring it to my new home in Munich.
I drove it from Bremerhaven to Munich through a
terrible blizzard. Outfitted in a leather flying
cap with goggles, and about five layers of
clothes with a military fur parka the outermost,
I'd pull the hood tight over the leather cap, and
wrap a long scarf around my face to keep from
getting frost bite. I drove as fast as I could
the entire trip. I would guess that I averaged
120MPH not counting "pit stops". The car had a
small competition windscreen and open pipes. It
was painted bright red with an Esso decal
diagonally positioned across the hood, and it had
a large Porsche crest painted on each front
fender. It definitly looked the part of a
racecar. After the second gas stop, and having
"chatted" with locals about my destination, it
got to the point that one would have thought I
was competing for a world's record. German
gearheads had apparently called ahead and told
thier friends along the route that some American
idiot was racing across Germany and it would be
worth going out in the storm to watch. As I
neared towns along the autobahn, small groups of
Germans gathered along the autobahn to wave flags
and cheer the crazy American along. At one gas
stop, there was even a reporter who took my
picture for a local German paper. Once I got
home and got thawed out, I campaigned the little
Devin in organized hill climbs throughout
sourthern Bavaria for three years. I was a member
of a local "American Military Sports Car Club"
and we had a series of events competing against
the "German Military Sports Car Club from
Bavaria". We had very simple rules, and a lot of
fun. Just this last weekend I was going through
boxes of my mother's things, to help her unpack
in her new apartment, when I came across several
pictures of the little car. Wow, did that spark
memories. Now, reading Pork-Pie's stuff has
fanned the spark into full flame. Ah, the things
we did when we were young!
Dick J
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