Imagine, if you will, you’re a racing driver in 1921 pushing to the absolute limits of human ingenuity, engineering, and bravery aboard your ridiculous contraption. You’re circulating AVUS ready to make an incredible high-speed drafting pass of your rival on the hideously intimidating six-mile straight. You’re chugging along at three-digit speeds in a four-wheeled contraption that hadn’t really been invented until just 30 years prior. You’ve never been this fast before, and perhaps you never will again. You’re at the pinnacle, the absolute forefront of humanity. You can see the end of the straight coming and a banked curve looms ahead of you. You carry as much of your speed as you can through the long sweeping corner and you’re presented with another equally-long, equally-scary straightaway, pointing once again toward 100 miles per hour and beyond. Speed on, you ridiculous ape! Nothing can stop you now!
The German automobile industry was growing rapidly in the early 1900s and high-speed testing was already becoming quite dangerous on public roads. As an effort to bolster the technological advancements of Germany’s blooming automakers, the Automobilclub developed a closed circuit to prove the speed advantages of German automobiles against the best in the world. Ground broke on the Automobil-Verkehrs und Übungsstraße (automobile training and traffic road) in 1907, though it wouldn’t open until 1921 as a result of construction and financial delays due to The Great War. The track is basically a six-mile section of Autobahn with a wildly banked northern turn (above) and a simple hairpin on the south end, making a 12.160-mile course that would become the ridiculous home of Grand Prix motor racing in Germany in the 1920s and 30s.
The source of Germany’s speed obsession
Over the years AVUS played home to several high-speed records, races, and car tests. In 1928, for example, Fritz “Rocket Fritz” von Opel managed a speed record at Avus of 148 miles per hour in his speed demon Opel RAK2 powered by 24 solid fuel rockets, as he needed at least six miles of runway to make it happen. A decade later, during a non-points Grand Prix event, Mercedes driver Hermann Lang set an average closed-course race speed of 171 miles per hour which would not be beat for 49 years until the 1986 Indianapolis 500. To achieve that level of speed, the AVUS north curve was rebuilt to incorporate an even steeper banking. The original banking was a mere ten degrees, but for the 1936 season the brick-paved curve was increased to an incredible 43 degrees. By comparison the high banks at Daytona International Speedway are just 31 degrees.
At its pre-war peak the AVUS races were among the most popular sporting events in Berlin, drawing over 300,000 attendees. There were no major car races held at AVUS between 1938 and 1951, at first because of Bernd Rosemeyer’s death in a tragic land speed record attempt proving Grand Prix cars were too fast for these kinds of circuits, and later as a result Germany’s instigating of World War II. Beginning in 1951 the track once again saw car racing with lower regional formula series racing there, though the length of the circuit was shortened by a little over half to reduce speeds and danger, though the wild banked corner was retained.
Banked for speed
It wasn’t until 1959 that a points-paying round of the Formula One World Championship would be run at AVUS, with the XXI Grosser Preis von Deutschland with two thirty-lap heats, both dominated by Ferrari with a Tony Brooks, Dan Gurney, Phil Hill all-Ferrari podium. Even with the much shorter straight, the race set a record for the fastest F1 race in history at the time, with an average speed of 143.3 mph.
AVUS was phased out of use in 1999, and the banked curve has long since been dismantled, but the remains of the track are now the northern part of Bundesautobahn 115 outside Berlin. Over the course of this track’s life it played host to Grand Prix racing, World Sportscars, BMW M1 Procar, the Interserie championship, Porsche Carrera Cup, German and European Formula 3, and DTM. By the 1990s, however, the track had been shortened to just 1.653 miles total, a fraction of its former long-legged high-speed mania. This is the kind of track that will never exist again, a tiny speck in the history of the automobile, but certainly a significant one.
