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1947 Veritas Rennsportwagen by Len Frank photography by Barry Taylor
G¸nther Molter: The war was finished. Germany was a heap of ruins . . . hundreds of thousands were still imprisoned. On the N¸rburgring, the hedges of the fence had grown into the middle of the speedway . . . Everywhere was the frightful picture. Desolated and lonely all these difficult curves and the long rectangular ways . . . Dead and empty the pits . . . Shortly after the war, a group of us once again met to celebrate not only the end of the war, but our meeting again with our beloved speedway . . . It was a dark and cold day. The rain was coming down straight and hard; dark clouds were hanging in the sky. We all got a very strange and sad feeling; we were afraid of the future of motorsport in Germany. For those interested, the cash costs of the war are available. For the purpose of this piece, it’s enough to note that Germany was broke, bankrupt, impoverished. There were hardly tools or technology enough for wheelbarrows. The Germans had squandered their resources hoping for a quick end to the war; and by its end theirs was a land scraped bare of machines and machine tools, fuel, rubber – the simplest mechanical necessities. Most people, civilians and "instant civilians," were more concerned with the hardness of black bread than the hardness of a crankshaft, more concerned with the cooking oil than lubrication oil. What a time to go racing. But they did. From under haystacks and out of root cellars came the precious BMWs, the Adlers and DKWs carefully hidden away from the Lancasters and Liberators that had been too often the predominant fact of life in years past. Those survivor cars figured as more than mere fodder for the revival of the sport in Germany. They were also the blueprints for the revival of the industry. Viewed from this perspective – and almost any other perspective, for that matter – the BMW 328 was certainly Germany’s most important prewar sports car, the others tending toward the Racing Truck school of design or falling into the Eccentric Toy class. BMW had brought the 328 along from the tube-framed 2-liter six with Fiedler-designed pushrod-operated hemi-head. The 328 was to the prewar sportsman what the Porsche Carrera was to his counterpart 15 or 20 years later. BMW won an abbreviated Mille Miglia in 1940 using a Superleggera coupe streamliner version of the 328. Winning speed for the 900-plus miles was comfortably over 100 mph – not bad for a 2-liter car running on the skinny-tires/fat-drivers theme. (Not that the elegant von Hanstein, later Porsche’s racing chief, was fat.) In 1946, the first postwar race, a hillclimb, was held in the French Zone. It was won by one of the surviving MM 328 BMWs. Two weeks later, the second race (in the autobahn!) was scheduled. The German police tried to have it canceled, but with the crowds booing and the U.S. military authorities approving, they relented and let the cars run. Some 50,000 spectators showed up. I like thinking that among the 50,000 were Lorenz Dietrich, Ernst Loof, and George Meier. The three were, by their own account, unwilling participants in the occupation of Paris (one wonders how the war lasted so long with so many unwilling participants). Dietrich was there managing the Gnome-Rhome aircraft engine factory for his employers. Meier, one of the most famous of Germany’s prewar motorcycle racers, and also an Auto Union driver, was temporarily a motorpool officer. Loof, also a motorcycle champion before the war, had run BMW’s sports car department, and had, in fact, built the 328 von Hanstein had used to win the 1940 Mille Miglia – the same car that had won that first postwar hillclimb. Loof was spending his Parisian working hours ministering to BMW "double star" aircraft engines. The three German countrymen whiled away the soft Parisian nights sitting in cafes telling one another about the postwar racing plans. In March 1947, along with a bicycle racer name Miethe, the three opened a small shop in W¸rttemberg. Loof began engine development, Dietrich handled business. For no recorded reason, they called the new venture, and its BMW-based product, Veritas. Truth. Veritas prevalebit? Veritas vincit? Who knows? The car was clearly BMW in concept. The famous 328 iron block six with the
double-rocker cross-pushrod head wad developed form its stock 80-85 ho to about 125 hp.
The tube frame and suspension were strongly reminiscent of the stock 328 – two
tapered main tubes with tubular and boxed cross members, cross leafsprung independent
front suspension, solid Running at first against early –‘30s Bugattis and Alfas and newer "cooking" versions of the 328, the Veritas was an immediate success. Across the Alps, Enzo Ferrari was causing the first of his 2-liter twelves (Type 166) to happen. Things were a bit better in Italy. Turin and Milan had not been flattened as had the German industrial centers, the war had been over longer, the Russians had not instituted their agrarian reforms. The normal state of poverty was all but restored. It was inevitable that the two new cars should meet – the German car, pieced together from buried treasured junk, and the Italian, a new car designed by the famous Colombo, a purpose-built racecar. Surprise! The Veritas could run with the Ferrari. When production – such as it was – got underway and cars got into the hands of customers in Belgium, Switzerland, and England, the hot rods gave the Ferraris a worse time than the contemporary A6GCS Maseratis, the British Alta, and HWM could. It was remarkable. A little success in that gloomy time was a heady drug. The tiny Veritas firm moved to Messkirch in the French Zone. Typically Dietrich traded anything marketable for the BMW parts that had been horded by those who knew their true value, instead of the usual sugar, coffee, or tasteless tinned meat. The Deutschmark was worthless and barter was the way of life. A customer for an early Veritas most often brought his own clapped-out BMW bits, precious lumps of iron, not too much rust, not too many surface cracks. Payment for turning the worn parts into a new car was preferably more spares, old BMW stuff. It seems proper, then, walking through Jim Proffit’s shop in an industrial slum near the water in Southern California, looking at the frames of hanging off the high ceiling, the gloomy, dusty shelved covered with brittle corrugated cardboard boxes filled with thousands – tens of thousands – of new/old stock, desks, work tables piled with projects, remainders of projects. The Veritaswerke must have looked thus back there in 1947. In the back, Bruce Henderson, a New Zealander, hammers and wheels out body panels for another Rennsport, for an OSCA junior, for a 328 Mille Miglia prototype. In another corner is a rebodied Lotus IX, over there a Speedwell Sprite. In the back room, a Fiat 500C (the late Topolino) awaits final finishing. Proffit admits he went a bit far with it – Konis, balanced, ported, cam. "Built it for the street," he says, "but maybe vintage racing, too." It may have as much as 20 hp. Odd story: Some years ago I was driving through another L.A. waterfront slum when I spotted – periscope eyes – what I took to be a Veritas N¸rburgring. The N¸rburgring, the Comet, and the Saturn were the roadgoing cars – odd rococo coupes and cabriolets, unmistakable, rare, ugly. And here I am, in my usual fog, driving on automatic, the other parts of my brain asleep, seeing what is certainly a mirage. A Veritas in a vacant lot? No. Certainly not. A half mile down the road, I have to go back. And there it is, just as I saw it, weeds growing all around, mismatched tires flat, padded top a luxury hotel for Teutonophilic mice, soggy upholstery, peeling paint, mechanical despair. Fellow comes out of the house next door and tells me it has a Porsche 5-speed and asks do I know anyone who wants it? I do not. We finish our pleasantries talking about the best place to get cheap used parts for his ’67 MGB. Exit. Five years later, there at Monterey Historics is Proffit’s Rennsport, anything but mechanically despairing, glorious in yellow, exhaust crackling, amazingly modern for so old a car. Turns out that Proffit, too, drives the same slums, enjoys the same quirk of vision. He, too, saw the N¸rbergring. Its hulk now rots in the lot next to his hop. It did, indeed, have the 5-speed (certainly not Porsche), and it also had the rare Heinkel/Veritas Meteor engine. For a while, back then, It looked as if Veritas might make it. They had orders on the books for 600 cars, many of them for export. Loof, not content with searching in odd corners of a 10-year-old Bimmer for more horsepower, had a modern engine drawn up. The new engine was a 7-mainbearing inline six with a square (75 mm) bore/stroke ratio, alloy block and head (the BMW had a long stroke in an iron block), a hemi combustion chamber with a single overhead camshaft, and the same sort of vertical port layout – surmounted by three downdraft carbs – as the BMW 328. It also had a strange dual oil pump arrangement with the drive between the dual rotors. It was designed for a straight swap in place of the older six. Heinkel, temporarily out of the aircraft business, busied itself with Kabinenrollers and the production of the components for the Veritas engine. Perhaps 50 were built, slowly, painstakingly, by hand. Proffit discovered that the thin literature on the Veritas engine was, indeed, correct, that it helped push the underfinanced company right into a bottomless lake of red ink. Fortunately, he has all of their mistakes in front of him, which explains why the engine enjoys an Iskenderian camshaft, followers and springs, an Aviad dry sump system, Datsun diesel rod bolts, Audi Turbo exhaust valves, Nissan Patrol intakes – all suitably modified. Proffit likes authenticity, but if originality were made a religion, the cars wouldn’t be alive anymore. And "alive" is just the word to describe the results of his ministrations. Why the Veritas, why such an expensive, virtually unknown car? Because I couldn’t find a BMW 328 Mille Miglia." Proffit says he likes German cars – "comes from working on British cars" – but not Mercedes, not Porsche. "They use the people to protect the engine," he says of the latter; "that’s real arrogance." That leaves BMW. Which explains the charming little fabric Weinberger-bodied 315 next to the factory competition 328, next to the 327. It also explains why Proffit plays tech boffin to the vintage BMW club. When Proffit first saw his Veritas, it nearly brought tears to his eyes. They were not tears of joy. He had bought the car sight unseen out of a gas station in New Hampshire. What rolled out of the transport truck (on Chevy wheels) was a tangerine-flake hulk, butchered, Ford-powered, with a waterpipe rollbar and flex tubing exhaust. The frame was bent, rusted. It was taken apart, stripped, de-rusted, the rollbar and Ford engine trashed, the remainder hung from the rafters to season for a few years. Veritas’ failure is a monument to a lack of faith, a lack of insight on the part of the German banking community. Proffit figures that the cost of restoration for his car would have been enough to have saved the entire company from bankruptcy. And isn’t that a damn shame. There was never enough money to properly debug the new engine. As suggested above, they had trouble with the oil pump and drive gears, they burned pistons. Still, they eventually developed 180 or so hp. Pretty good for that era. Pretty good for this one, too. Not that Proffit figures his engive has anything like that. He likes to remove some of the vintage liabilities from his cars. It shows in the on-board fire system, the removable rollcages, the reworked suspension geometrics. He avoids excess in the regard. No Chevy gears inside vintage gearboxes, no disc brakes where drums once were; but no fetishes, either. And no ugly puddles of oil under the engine. It took Proffit, associate Perry Price, and sundry others 10 weeks from the time the car came off the ceiling until it arrived at Monterey last August. It was 10 weeks with seven days to the week and 15 or 20 hours to each day. He’s not anxious to repeat the exercise. Further disassembly, investigation, and research showed that the car was built as a roadster, then converted by Veritas to a coupe. As an early car, it has a 328 frame. The car appears to have come to the New World as the property of a GI. It was then sold to a New Jersey import dealer who thought he might race it. His bodyman talked him into cutting the to of and making the car a roadster again. The bodyman thus became the next owner, though he may have skipped the formality of paying for it. The trail wends its way to Annapolis, Maryland, where a Fred Losee, USN, bought it with the intention of running it at Sebring, circa 1953. He never did and the Veritas disappeared for 20 years to resurface at a body shop in New Hampshire. When the body shop denizens tired of looking at it, it transferred to the gas station – where Proffit enters the picture. Proffit still marvels at the way in which the chassis swallowed tubing while it was being rebuilt – about 300 ft of it. Most of it is the framing used to support the slick shell. And it is slick. A Rennsport was clocked at 147 mph on the Jabbeke-Ostend highway in Belgium. The same car ran a 15-sec quarter mile with the 3.3:1 top speed gears in it. The German automotive press of the day, various city governments (hungry for the employment and taxes), the three principals, all tried to raise money to save the Veritas. The bank refused, and it was all over about five years after it started. Loof tried again to build a similar car with even less success. Lorenz and Meier became financially independent. Poor Loof died in 1956, still trying to make BMWs go faster than perhaps they wanted to. Proffit’s car was shown at the Concours d’Elegance that preceded the Long Beach Grand Prix. The show includes a rolling review – the cars are driven up in front of the judging stand "in a manner that befits the car." Veritas arrived on the red carpet with a blatting of open exhausts, the nervous engine sounds, the smells of a race car. When it departed, it was at 6000 rpm leaving two long black streaks (locked diff) on the carpet. Proffit was awarded the "Best Presentation" trophy. I voted for him. Loof would have been proud. Home TOC Links Contact Us Letters About Len |
axle in the rear sprung by torsion bars. The bodies were light alloy, as
aerodynamically correct as intuition could make them, supported, like the Touring-Bodied
cars by a light tubing birdcage.