Berlin-Rome race

By Jackie Jouret
Photos courtesy The BMW Archive

As we saw in the first three installments of this series, BMW had fostered an association with Touring of Milan before World War II put an end to civilian automotive activities in 1941. That association had resulted in the Superleggera coupe that won the 1940 Mille Miglia, a pair of roadsters for which Touring crafted the bodywork to a design by BMW’s Wilhelm Meyerhuber, and a trio of stunning roadsters created for the proposed Berlin-Rome race.

One might have expected the Touring-BMW partnership to have resumed after the war, given the competitive and aesthetic success of those automobiles, but it did not. When BMW began building cars again in 1951, the company turned instead to Pinin Farina for the external proposal that would be weighed against an in-house design for the 501 sedan. [Read more…] about BMW’s Italian Designers Part 4

By Jackie Jouret
Photo courtesy The BMW Archive

Among the most fascinating races of the pre-war era is one that never took place: the Berlin-Rome race. Announced in June 1937 for the following year, the race had been conceived by Adolf Hühnlein, an early follower of Adolf Hitler, who in 1931 became head of Germany’s National Socialist Driver Corps (or NSKK, to use its German acronym). The NSKK was in charge of all motoring and motorsport activities for the Nazi government, and Hühnlein ensured that German racing was well-supported in service of its propaganda value. A high-speed race on the newly-built freeways connecting the two Axis capitals would be ideally suited to that purpose, and it would allow German and Italian automakers to highlight their technical superiority where aerodynamics were concerned.

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