Jalopnik: auto union type d

Vorsprung Your Way to Goodwood This July to See Audi at Its Very Best

Peter Orosz — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Audi will be the featured marque at this year's Festival of Speed, held July 3-5. This is your last chance to see the Auto Union race cars before Audi becomes, by default, hopelessly uncool.

It is not without a sense of unease to contemplate the meteoric rise of Audi these past few years. A company with a Gordian knot of a history best known for making slightly better Volkswagens has somehow replaced both BMW and Porsche at the bleeding edge of German design and technology. And being on top is, of course, uncool by default.

It may already be too late. Audi is perhaps already what Porsche was in the 80s and buying an R8 these days may now perhaps be akin to purchasing a yellow 911 convertible in Thatcherite Britain.

But none of this really matters for making up your mind whether to attend this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, where Audi will be the featured carmaker. What matters is that they will have on display the entire spectrum of Audi racing cars, including the prewar Auto Unions. With twelve and sixteen cylinders and as many straight pipes for exhausts which carried Bernd Rosemeyer to Grand Prix victories and, later on, to death.

Read more and plan your trip at the Festival of Speed site.

Photo Credit: VOLKER HARTMANN/AFP/Getty Images

Auto Union Type D Race Car To Auction For $8 Million

Peter Orosz — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Lamborghini V12’s are passé. Three million people have seen that clip of a Countach with custom exhausts revving its engine. Let’s see what Lamborghini’s parent company can do in the V12 department.

Audi’s last V12 ran on diesel and won at Le Mans three times between 2006 and 2008. The one before that was built seventy years before, ran on gasoline, and powered the Auto Union Type D in the 1938 and 1939 seasons of the European Grand Prix Championship. It was Ferrari-small, only three liters of displacement, but by the time it gained two-stage supercharging for 1939, the engine developed close to 500 HP. This was the car Tazio Nuvolari hit a deer with, in practice for the 1938 Donington Grand Prix.

If you would like to one-up the great little man of Mantua and upgrade to perhaps smacking into a bison, now is your chance: chassis #19 of the Type D will be up for auction by Bonhams & Butterfields on August 14 in Carmel, California. Number nineteen was driven by Nuvolari’s teammate Hans Stuck on the Nürburgring and at Reims.

Expect to spend about $8,000,000 and remember: bison are large, aggressive animals.

Source: Keith Martin’s Sports Car Market

Audi Resurrects Auto Union Type D Racer For Goodwood, Pink Floyd's Mason Behind Wheel

Mark Arnold — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:30:00 EDT

At next month's Goodwood Festival of Speed, Audi plans to unveil their authentic reconstruction of a 1939 Auto Union Type D Dual Compressor. The single-seat roadster, a replica of the Grand Prix racer driven by the likes of Tazio Nuvolari and H.P. Müller, will be driven by none other than Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. Mason'll have to tame the 420 HP V12, the mother-loving engine at the atom heart of the Type D, as it spins those skinny tires up the hill at Goodwood. Luckily, Mason isn't new to priceless classic race cars.

Pink Floyd's big drummer boy owns quite a few cars. OK, that's an understatement. Mason reportedly owns around 40 with "25-30" being what you'd call "serious." He's owned or still owns a Type 35 Bugatti, D-type Jaguar, Maserati 250F, Ferrari 250GTO, just to name a few. So we're pretty sure he'll feel comfortable handling the '39 replica.

Sure, he's a Brit driving a replica of an original Auto Union racer — a car engineered by Ferdinand Porsche, and commissioned by Adolf Hitler and the government of Nazi Germany. See, Nazis and Grand Prix Racing go way back. [via Carscoop, Times Online]