Take a streamlined silver record car past 430 km/h on an ordinary concrete autobahn and set the fastest flying kilometre ever driven on a public road, or race the greats of 1938 on a marble oval that never was, for an afternoon or a whole season.
Autobahn Frankfurt–Darmstadt. Concrete slabs, pine forest on both sides, crosswind waiting in every clearing.
Motor Union's streamliner, Rosenau's car. The V16 sits behind the driver: it grips off the line, but the tail steps out if you lift in a gust.
Dessau record stretch, planned for January 1940 and cancelled by the war. Six wheels, an aero engine, a target of 600 km/h.
A banked marble oval outside a Berlin that never was. Colosseum arches full of spectators, the Brandenburg Gate beyond the first turn, a great dome on the horizon and the airship overhead. Twelve cars in their national colours, a 10 km lap, brick bankings that rise to 45° under the wall, and a slipstream worth having. Sprint races, a 16-lap Grand Prix with pit stops, and an all-T-Himmelsjäger race at 550 km/h on bankings raised almost to the vertical.
Sign for Stellar-Werke or Motor Union and drive the 1938 season at the Götterrennbahn, against the drivers who raced it. A record week on the autobahn in January, then race weekends from April to October with practice, qualifying and the race. Points as they were counted in 1938, when the fewest won. Prize money for the workshop, rivals with their form, their breakdowns and their grudges, team orders from the pit wall, and after every round the Motor-Kurier with the story and the photographs.
* still racing when you took the flag: the gap is estimated from their pace.
Arrows steer, Gas and Brake on the right, + and − shift.
Stellar-Werke and Motor Union brought streamlined record cars to the new autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt. The road was closed for the attempts, but it was an ordinary motorway: concrete slabs with tar joints, a grass median with bridge piers, and forest right up to the verge. Bernd Rosenau's Motor Union became the first car to pass 400 km/h on a public road, with 406.32 km/h over the flying kilometre.
Rudolf Caravelli took the Z100 Götterblitz to 432.7 km/h over the flying kilometre on the same stretch. Rosenau went out to answer later that morning. A gust of crosswind in a forest clearing caught his car at about 430 km/h and he was killed. Caravelli's speed stayed the fastest ever recorded on a public road until 2017.
Motor Union's Type Chaosfürst carried its supercharged V16 behind the driver and wore a fully enclosed streamlined body for the record runs. Rosenau drove it to 406.32 km/h in October 1937.
A record version of the 1937 Grand Prix car with a 5.6-litre supercharged V12 of 736 PS and a body with a drag coefficient of about 0.157. For January 1938 the nose was closed almost completely and the engine was cooled by a tank of ice instead of a radiator.
The T-Himmelsjäger was designed to take the absolute land speed record: a 44-litre aero V12, six wheels with four of them driven, small side wings for downforce and a body 8.24 m long. A straight section of autobahn near Dessau was built without a central reservation and with bridges that had no central piers. The attempt was planned for January 1940 with Hans Stucki driving. The war stopped it and the car never ran under its own power.
This race never happened. The Götterrennbahn is imagined: a banked oval in the spirit of the AVUS in Berlin, where in May 1937 the streamlined silver cars lapped the steep brick north curve at well over 250 km/h. Its stands borrow from Rome and Greece: Colosseum arcades, Doric colonnades, a ring of marble statues. The city on the horizon is imagined as well, white stone and colonnades with a vast dome taken from unbuilt plans for Berlin. The airship LZ 129 really did fly over the Olympic stadium in Berlin in August 1936. The arch over the line, the loggia bridge over the back straight and the passage beneath the grandstand are imagined too; the chalked lap board and the timekeepers' hut are how the AVUS and Monza kept the times.
The drivers are the stars of 1938: Rudolf Caravelli, the European champion; Hermann Lange; Manfred von Brausewitz, quick and hard on his tyres; Richard Seaward, the Englishman in the Stellar-Werke team; Tazio Nebbiani, who joined Motor Union that summer; Hans Stucki and Rudolf Haase; Giuseppe Farrano for Corsa Milano; and René Dreyer in the Dumaine.
History mode moves the season of 1938 to the Götterrennbahn and keeps, round by round, the dates of the real races: Pau in April, Tripoli in May, Reims, the Nürburgring, Bremgarten, Monza and Donington. The championship of the day was scored the other way round: 1 point for a win, 2 for second, 3 for third, 4 for anyone who finished or covered three quarters of the distance, 5, 6 or 7 for less, and 8 for missing a race. The driver with the fewest points was champion, and in 1938 that was Caravelli. Cars broke far more often than they crashed: superchargers, pistons, fuel pumps and gearboxes. Team managers like Alfred Neumeyer ran the pits with stopwatches, flags and chalked boards, the only news a driver had of the race. Hermann Paul Mahler drove for Motor Union, and Nebbiani, who left Corsa Milano in the spring, joined them in the summer and won at Monza and Donington.
The car enters the measured kilometre already at full speed. An official record is the average of two runs in opposite directions, which cancels out any head- or tailwind.
The physics in this game are simplified and tuned so that a near-perfect run lands close to the historic speeds.