What killed Count Louis Zborowski?

So what of Zborowski, from England, in his first works drive for Mercedes?

He had been delayed at the start because of a sticking clutch, necessitating a push. The eight-cylinder Mercedes engines had proved to be reluctant to fire up, to the extent that ether had to be fed from a small tank under the scuttle to the carburettors to induce them to start. Werner had also been delayed on the line when the flag fell at 10 am.

After Zborowski had started, he had to stop to change tyres but got away again, only to crash fatally on lap 44. News of this did not reach the Mercedes pits until Antonio Ascari was being flagged home as the winner, his Alfa Romeo having averaged 98.79 mph. Ascari’s team-mates Wagner and Campari/Presenti were second and third, with Minoia fourth.

Zborowski’s accident happened at the fast Lesmo curve. Early reports suggested that the Mercedes had run wide and collided with a tree (no Armco then, of course) and that the car had then skidded back across the road and struck another one head on. Len Martin, the Count’s riding mechanic, was not too badly injured but Zborowski died soon afterwards. On hearing of the accident, Max Sailer had Werner and Metz flagged in.

Sammy Davis told how he heard of the death of his friend after ” . . the loudspeaker of my set was switched on and . . . confirmed my worst fears.”

This is interesting as well as sad, because it suggests that at this still experimental stage in wireless broadcasts, Davis must have had a pretty powerful set if he received the transmission direct from Italy. But maybe he heard the announcement on 2LO, which, if lt was in Sunday evening action as early as 1924, could have had the news from Reuters and transmitted it, as Zborowski was so well known and liked in this country.

Perhaps a radio buff can tell me?

Lt-Col Clive Gallop, with whom I travelled to see Fred Ellis’s restoration of a twin-cam Aston-Martin similar to that the Count raced when Gallop was Zborowski’s engineer, told me, 23 years after the accident, that not only did the Monza Autodrome authorities hold a three-day inquiry into the crash, but that he was ordered to attend a similar investigation by Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft. Gallop had the dismal task of conveying the Count’s body to his home at Higham, in Kent, the coffin being carried from Dover to the house on Zborowski’s aged Mercedes truck, on which his racing cars had been transported to European circuits. In sympathy with the occasion, I have heard that it expired on the house drive with a seized-up steering column, the bushes thereof being made of poor wartime material . .

First accounts of the accident suggested that a seized cable on one of the Mercedes’ front brakes had prevented the driver from releasing the brake after sliding on oil on the corner (as early disc brakes did when used on the sports/racing Jaguars). This theory was given some credence because Masetti’s four-cylinder Mercedes, with similar brakes, had crashed three weeks earlier at San Sebastian for this very reason. In practice Neubauer had lost his Mercedes at the same Lesmo corner, causing the car to spin round on the wet road and hit a bank; Neubauer and his mechanic Hemmingway were uninjured. But the Mercedes investigation found nothing wrong with either car. Caracciola’s biography, however, suggests that immediately after Zborowski’s pit stop a tyre deflated, causing the crash. It is true that in a photograph of the wrecked car one front tyre is clearly flat, but this could have been caused by the impact. As the axle appears to have been torn from the chassis it is difficult to decide whether it was the near or offside tyre that punctured.

After that, this 1924 Mercedes languished at T&Ts until it was acquired by J A Peck, who had a garage in Staines, just before the war. (When Mays used it the starting trouble had not been cured. He said the mechanics kept the revs to 6000 from a cold start, as otherwise the engine would stall, and even when warm he found it would stop if the speed became too slow. At Brooklands Mays saw 7400 rpm in top gear, but getting to this speed “took entirely too long”.) These Mercedes later gained a number of successes in hillclimbs and speed trials, and Caracciola won the 1926 German GP in one of them, on the smooth Avus track, running it as a stripped ‘sports car’, with Eugen Salzer squeezed in beside him. Its handling was now perhaps a little better, thanks to relocation of the fuel tank. Even so Rudi stalled at the start and had to be push-started. Team-mate Rosenberger, using ether as at Monza, started cleanly but later ran off the wet track into a timekeepers’ box, killing three of the occupants. How wise Caracciola had been to refuse to drive at Monza two years earlier. . .

It does seem fairly conclusive that the poor handling was the cause of Zborowski’s fatal accident, coupled with poor steering geometry, to which Peck drew our attention when I took Gallop to see his car in 1948, saying he was surprised that Porsche and T&Ts failed to notice it. Karl Ludvigsen comments, in his great work on Mercedes and Benz racing cars, the standard reference work on the subject, that the angularity of the long drag-link encouraged steering kick-back with suspension movement, and the hard springing probably altered the castor action, which was designed into the axle, through which the springs passed, the hubs off-set to the rear of the kingpins.

But Mercedes GB would have nothing of this! It told the press that it had been concluded that “the accident was due totally to the car being oversteered (interesting that this now universal term was used so early) when leaving a curve.” They said that Len Martin’s confirming statement, as the riding mechanic, “was beyond any doubt”. This incurred bitter criticism from Zborowski supporters here. I have tried to obtain a copy of Mercedes’ report, but I have been unable to do so, though Mercedes-Benz UK’s PR Sue Colby provided an eye-witness account from the Daimler-Benz museum (see Eye Witness Account).

It is an unhappy thought that had Zborowski abandoned the Grand Prix when told the night before of his Mercedes’ clutch trouble, or had Len Martin not been able to push-start the car either at the beginning of the event or after the tyre stop, the Count would have returned the Lancia Lambda lent to him by the Monza authorities and lived to race again.

Alas, there is no place in motor racing for ifs and buts . . .