René Dreyfus: the racing driver detested by the Nazis

I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A racing car is a fearsome environment of engulfing pyroclastic heat, metaphor-testing noise, vision-blurring vibration and nauseating centrifugal forces. Ninety years ago it was even worse. The cars had tyres with little grip, feeble brakes and no crash protection whatever. Hot oil would continuously spray over drivers, who raced in linen caps; and an off, as they call excursions, would often result in mutilation or immolation.

Faster is the story of René Dreyfus, who flourished in this atrocious atmosphere, in a culture where the public found the achievement of speed a transfixing spectacle. After all, Aldous Huxley believed speed was the only sensation unique to the 20th century, since flight had been known to 18th-century balloonists.

A suave, rich, non-observant Niçois Jew, Dreyfus existed in a cascade of Jazz Age brilliance, with plenty of champagne and casino visits. He can be found in the Encyclopaedia of Jews in Sport, not an enormous publication. With Lucy Schell, an American heiress and adventuress, and Charles Weiffenbach of Delahaye, a French businessman most experienced in the manufacture of fire-engines, Dreyfus formed Ecurie Bleue, so called because blue was the designated colour of France in international motor racing.

This part of Dreyfus’s career culminated in 1938 at the Pau Grand Prix when, in an underpowered car managed by a nicely amateurish team, he beat the German Silver Arrows. These were the pitilessly organised technocrats, with their Porsche-designed Mercedes-Benzes and Auto-Unions, that were mandated by Hitler to demonstrate to the world that the Ubermensch concept applied to cars as well as people.

Motor racing is expensive and absurd, dangerous and irresponsible — and that is why it is compelling.