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During the rise of the Third Reich, two German car manufacturers

were ordered to build the most high-performance vehicles the world

had ever seen.

What followed was a rivalry that would reap Grand Prix victories...

...international domination that was a propaganda coup...

...and provide world fame to its drivers who risked their lives

smashing speed records that would stand for 79 years.

All under the direct orders of the Fuhrer himself.

This is the story behind Hitler's Supercars.

1939 and the Nazification of Germany is complete.

Sieg heil!

Hitler's Third Reich are armed and ready to rampage across Europe.

But just ten years earlier, it was a completely different story.

The Great Depression is absolutely catastrophic for Germany,

it's just starting to pick itself up after terrible years

following the end of the First World War, and it's working

as a democracy, it's working as a liberal society.

Then suddenly comes a Wall Street crash followed

by the Great Depression. Germany gets embroiled in all of that.

And it's just economic disaster and it's disaster as well

for the German car industry.

Germany in 1928,

there were still 64 car manufacturers.

Four years later, 1932,

only 26 did survive.

Labourer's lost their work. You had, four years before in 1932,

around 84,000 people working in the automotive industry and

four years later, only 35,000 people were still working there.

It was disastrous.

Whenever you have a serious financial crisis, you always, always

have political upheaval.

And it's this upheaval that allows the Nazis to take hold.

But with Hitler comes ideals of nationalism, of a return

to this kind of, sort of, the Aryan ideal.

And with that comes sporting prowess.

And the most modern and exciting area of modern prowess

and nationalism in sport is, of course, motor racing.

All of the national motor racing superpowers had their brand,

had their diamond team. Italy, Alfa Romeo.

France, Bugatti. England, ERA.

English Racing Automobiles.

Couldn't be more transparent, what it was all about.

About the flag, about the nation, about the characters

and who they were.

And one of the greatest exponents of that real national pride

was the Germans.

AVUS. Now an unspectacular corner of Berlin.

But 90 years ago, it was at the epicentre

of international motor racing.

It was really a kind of temple of the modern world.

It was an extraordinary configuration.

Really, it was just one dual carriageway six miles each way

with two bends, one at either end the south curve and the north curve.

The circuit was very close to the buildings where the

Berlin Motor Show would be held, which was a very,

very significant event.

It was all a big kind of complex of modernity.

There wasn't another purpose-built racing gladiatorial auditorium

in any other European capital city.

Not in Turin, not in Paris, not in London, but there was in Berlin.

What singles the AVUS ring out from many of the other long, fast

circuits of the period,

was 'Rs danger.

It was very fast,

it was very challenging and it could kill you.

At that stage in the life of the motorcar,

people were just thrilled by the spectacle

of cars going at 100mph, 150mph.

You know, this was like watching space travel.

The 1932 German Grand Prix at the AVUS circuit

was a very significant event indeed.

Rudolf Caracciola, who had been Germany's number one racing ace,

turned up at the wheel of an Alfa Romeo painted white

in German national colours.

But still he got booed, because he was driving an Italian car.

And there were lots of other big cars,

5L Bugattis, V16 Maseratis. Very exciting things.

But the most interesting car was a Mercedes driven by

Manfred von Brauchitsch.

Mercedes Benz did not really have a Grand Prix product

they could put on a track and take on the likes of Bugatti

and Mia Romeo... Uni“ they're on home turf.

Because AVUS was such a high speed circuit,

the Mercedes was modified with a streamlined body,

which was a pretty new thing at the time.

It just had kind of new body panels, but it looked very space age.

It just looked completely different and wild.

It was just about one big thing - Teutonic power.

And that they had and they had a lot of it.

And you put that old technology in a streamlined coach work body

and on the AVUS ring...

...you've got a winner.

People will get excited if the outsider is winning

and Manfred von Brauchitsch which was the absolute outsider.

A young driver against the most famous German racing driver,

Rudolf Caracciola in his Alfa Romeo, and then this Mercedes Benz...

\ ..on the road. I

The radio reporter Dr Paul Laven was inventing the name,

"The Silver Arrow."

Der Silberpfeil kommt.

300,000 people in the amphitheatre of speed.

And sure enough, it was a head-to-head between Caracciola

and Von Brauchitsch.

Caracciola leads, but with all his skill

on the corners, he can't get away from the streamlined car.

And Von Brauchitsch won. Right at the end,

the big Mercedes goes ahead.

The 32 win at the AVUS ring can't really be underestimated, not

just in terms of motorsport history,

but in terms of world history.

The shock victory of 1932 is picked up on Hitler for a number

of reasons, but one of them, I think is because it's the underdog winning.

And the National Socialists,

I mean, you know, they're dead and buried in the middle of the 19205

and then suddenly they come from the back of the race.

And by 1932, they're kind of positioning themselves

where they might actually get into power for the first time,

against all the odds.

So there is this kind of weird synergy going on between the rise

of German performance in Grand Prix and the rise of Hitler

and the National Socialists.

On January 30th, 1933, seven months

after Von Brauchitsch's AVUS victory,

Hitler takes power of Germany

after being elected Reich Chancellor.

Within hours of being sworn in, he would set about motions

that just six months later would see him elevated to dictator.

In February 1933, Hitler opened

the Berlin International Car And Motorcycle Exhibition,

announcing to the world

his national motorisation programme.

This included state support for road building and motor sport.

Motor cars were very important to Hitler.

You know, he always had a nice Mercedes himself, but he was keen

to motorize Germany by building...

You know, the plans were to build 22,000kms of autobahns

and the Grand Prix team, with the idea of demonstrating

to the world what German technology could do.

In his mind being the thought that if we show them what we can do

with our Grand Prix cars, you know, they might start wondering

what we can do with other kinds of advanced technology.

Mercedes wasted no time pursuing this new source of money

for a new Grand Prix car.

They had always represented Germany in motor racing, so assumed

they would get all the money for the new national racing car.

However, there was a rival. Auto Union.

Auto Union came about when four German road car manufacturers -

Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer joined forces.

But it was obviously an attempt to get together and fight

the power of Mercedes.

And they presented Hitler their plans for a second German

national racing car.

And Hitler did approve and they split the money.

500,000 bucks for Mercedes Benz, 300,000 for Auto Union.

And so the duel was on.

That was National Socialism.

Anyone was allowed, ultimately. And, you know, Adolf Hitler

and what he did with Auto Union...

And he just stood up to Mercedes Benz and he said, "Well, these guys

"are playing, too. What you got?"

And for the guys on the board at Mercedes Benz that day...

Utter shock.

If you want to hear the reaction of the director of the Mercedes-Benz

company in 1933, I'll read it.

"We are the oldest car manufacturer in the world.

"It will, therefore, in our view, violate the sense of justice

"of every German

"if the funds which the Reich is willing to provide

"were to be allocated to a company that has not so far been engaged

"in building cars."

What Hitler wants is to make sure that Germany

dominates motor racing in the 1930s.

For seven months, the hand-picked crews of technicians at Mercedes

and Auto Union toiled and tested the very latest in lightweight

materials, aerodynamic thinking and supercharged engines.

After developing their designs in time for the 1934 Grand Prix

season, the first generation of Hitler's supercars had arrived.

The Auto Union Type A, nicknamed the P-Wagen - P standing

for Porsche after its designer, Dr Ferdinand Porsche -

was revolutionary with its mid engine design.

Now the norm in motor racing,

but back in 1934, this was unheard of.

Porsche's streamlined body was powered by a 4.4 litre

supercharged V16 engine, producing 280bhp, comprising

of 1622 individual component parts.

This was engineering on a whole new plain.

The Mercedes Benz W25 followed a more conventional route

with a front engine concept, but using the latest lightweight

materials shaped for aerodynamic efficiency. Power came from a 3.4l

straight-eight cylinder engine fitted with a soon-to-be infamous

howling supercharger that delivered a massive 325bhp, some

110 more than the class-leading Alfa Romeo of the time.

On January 4th, 1934, Hitler and Propaganda Minister

Joseph Goebbels got their first glimpse of the W25 in a Mercedes

showroom in Munich.

Goebbels's diary notes: "lnspected the new racing car at Mercedes.

"A fantastic job, first class."

The first of Hitler's supercars to break cover was the Auto Union

on January 12th 1934 at the AVUS circuit

to fulfil their contractual obligations to the Third Reich.

Mercedes and Auto Union prepared their cars

in great secrecy, keeping their technical secrets from each other.

But the great surprise was that when they appeared, Auto Union

got the jump on Mercedes.

That was the Nazi deal.

We'll give you the bucks, but you've got to produce

what we expect you to produce.

So Auto Union, it came with a very high bar, which was ten

consecutive laps of the AVUS ring in excess of 150mph.

Well, guess what?

They walked it. And set some records straight away with this amazing

rear engine car.

And that was a point for Auto Union against Mercedes Benz.

The Nazis can't make aircraft, you know, that is part of the Versailles treaty.

They can't do it. They can have glider clubs in secret.

They can be preparing for the Luftwaffe in secret,

but they don't have to be secret about motor racing.

What that's saying is, "Glamour, style.

"Elite. Modern technology, superb engineering."

It just folds in so many things that the Nazis love.

I mean, there's lots of things that the Nazis do really badly,

but one area where they are absolutely stupendously

good is in propaganda and PR.

They just nail it.

The Reich Ministry of Transport insisted that the new German

national racing cars make their public debut on home soil

at the Berlin Grand Prix at AVUS.

These cars were like nothing anybody had ever seen before.

Imagine what the German motor racing's public witnessed that day.

These machines slithered out of the back

of their transporters.

I'd love to have seen that.

It was just incredible, exciting stuff and great expectations.

You have to consider that German radio was covering

the training sessions.

They had supercharged engines, which wasn't new, but the kind

of superchargers Mercedes used made a very high,

piercing wail of a sound that was terrifying.

It was so important for the listeners and for the politicians

of the Third Reich to promote this race at the AVUS.

It would've been like seeing a time machine.

And yet it had a German in the seat.

And what an inspiration.

What have we done?

Look at what we've done.

Great expectations, but horrible performance.

Well, it didn't go as planned by any means for the German teams.

The whole thing backfired.

Mercedes Benz quit before the race.

We've got problems. We cannot solve them.

Mercedes took part in practice and then decided their performance

wasn't going to be good enough.

So rather than risk humiliation, they pulled out and didn't take part

in the race.

Auto Union, despite having these - in today's terms - multi,

multi-million dollar machines at their disposal got it all wrong.

The cars broke down and the race was won by an Mia Romeo

entered by Scuderia Ferrari and driven by Guy Moll,

a very brilliant young driver who came from an Algerian Jewish family.

And this in front of all these great leaders

of German Reich. Complete disaster.

Which is probably not what Hitler had in mind

when he put up the money for his two Grand Prix teams.

That's not good for the Nazi press.

And so keep it low down in the papers.

That was the message by Goebbels.

For their first excursion on foreign territory, they went to France,

to Montlhery, near Paris.

It was the first appearance of both German racing cars

outside their country.

Very important.

It's time to stamp your dominance, show the world what these things

can actually do. What better place to go?

Montlhery was a combined track.

Part of it was a banked oval, which would suit the high speed

nature of the cars that Mercedes and Auto Union were producing.

What better place to go and show 'em this new rule coming your way?

Which is us, the Germans.

What they showed in practice for the race was that they were

vastly superior to everything else.

The demonstration on foreign soil of their capabilities

was unmistakable.

The night that the Silver Arrows dominated qualifying at Montlhery...

...was also the Night Of The Long Knives.

I mean, you couldn't make it up.

It's like, you know, if it was in a Hollywood movie script,

you wouldn't believe it because the overmighty,

increasingly overmighty SA, the Sturmabteilung, which has been

instrumental in seeing the rise of the Nazis headed by Ernst Rohm

is just getting a bit above itself, it's starting to become a threat

rather than a colleague.

So Hitler orders this sort of cancelling out of the SA.

This night of terror produced many victims.

The Nazis killed the Nazis, but they didn't only

kill their former friends, they did kill the opponents, as well.

Dr Klausener, one of the founders of the Nurburgring, was murdered

in this night, too.

Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union didn't win this French Grand Prix.

It was the last time that Alfa Romeo would be able to keep

up with the German racing cars.

Although none of the German cars finished the French Grand Prix,

the dominance before their retirements

was a very obvious sign of things to come.

The German Grand Prix cars of the '30s were a fantastic spectacle.

Both teams adopted the sort of plain, silver looks.

It seemed very modern, like rocket ships.

So when those cars raced somewhere like AVUS, a real kind

of high speed bowl, it was like chariot racing in Rome.

Just something to astonish the populace.

It's a kind of war and the weapons are the racing cars.

You can promote how good your technicians work

and you can promote your national feelings by racing.

It wasn't just the cars.

What completed the story were the pilots, the drivers, the heroes.

They were the real focus.

They were the people who got out of the cars.

So in terms of the German propaganda machine, not only did you have such

a gulf of dominance, but then you had the beginning, the culture

of the celebrity superstar race car driver.

Well, thanks to Joseph Goebbels,

the German government became very quickly aware of the propaganda

value of motorsport and they produced what were,

in effect, propaganda films showing how the German racing teams

were conquering the world.

So you could tune in on your Joseph Goebbels-supplied Nazi radio to hear

the cars and to hear the commentary of the races.

And then on a Saturday night

you'd go down to the cinema and before watching Clark Gable,

you watched Hans Stuck getting out of his Silver Arrow.

Well, it was the beginning of a new world.

The peoples receiver, this is the Deutscher Kleinempfanger.

This might look quite big to you or I, but actually

in mid-1930s technology,

this is as revolutionary as the arrival of the iPod was in.

And everyone can have one, because it's subsidised by the state.

So they're super cheap.

I mean, you can see it's even got a little kind of swastika here.

And what that means is, again, Goebbels' media can dominate

and dominate the message.

What the German propaganda machine was portraying through the use

of motorsport was irresistible power.

The idea that they couldn't be beaten.

They had the best, most committed drivers.

The attention to detail in a world of amateurs.

Of course, it went far beyond motor racing.

You know, what it was saying was that our forces are stronger

than yours at every level.

In the space of four months,

the Silver Arrows had turned the international motorsport pecking

order on its head.

They had entered 13 races and won 11 of them, but for Mercedes,

there was still one piece of unfinished business.

When Auto Union put their cars on the track at the AVUS ring,

to get that investment from Hitler

and the Nazi Party to create these rival machines

to Mercedes Benz,

they set in motion a bit of a chain reaction.

Mercedes Benz got their act together, caught up and basically

beat Auto Union to the championship.

But there was one thing they didn't have, and that was the speed record.

Auto Union still held the record.

Now, what's Mercedes Benz going to do?

They're going to go out and smash it.

In October 1934, Mercedes set two new speed world records for one

mile from a standing start, plus the highest speed ever recorded

on a public road, clocking 197.261 miles per hour, smashing rivals

Auto Union and kicking off a race for speed, which would push

the boundaries of Nazi technology - but with devastating consequences.

February 1935. Hitler reveals his Luftwaffe.

This was part of the Third Reich's rearmament programme.

This loud, petrol-powered show of strength was also playing out

on the racetracks of Europe as Mercedes and Auto Union

continued their winning ways.

Everything changes in 1935, because this is when the Luftwaffe

was announced to the world in contravention of everything that's

been agreed in the Versailles treaty and suddenly its petrol power

in the air and on the ground.

1935 also saw the debut of a new German driver.

The arrival of Bernd Rosemeyer gave the German government exactly

what they wanted.

A young, handsome, exciting Aryan superhero

who was a great driver. No question about that.

He came into the Auto Union team.

The car was a very difficult car to drive. Rear-engined.

A lot of people couldn't handle it.

Rosemeyer was a motorcycle racer.

So stick him, with all that bravery, in a rear engine Auto Union

16-cylinder Grand Prix car.

All the traditional guys were complaining

about this and complaining about that.

For Rosemeyer, it was perfect.

There was nothing wrong with it. How could you possibly complain about this?

It just came very naturally to him,

taming this, what was supposed to be, a fearsome beast.

And by the end of 1935, it was very clear that he was as fast

as the fastest.

He managed to win his first Grand Prix

at the Masaryk ring, in the Czechoslovakian area.

And then he met his wife.

He met his wonderful aviator, very exotic, fabulous celebrity,

German wife on the podium at the Czech Grand Prix,

which he won.

Elly Beinhorn was a female aviator and very famous in Germany.

Kind of famous as Amelia Earhart from the United States.

Young woman, very nice-looking, very vivacious, good hero material.

And she'd become the second woman to fly solo

from Europe to Australia.

She'd crash landed in the Sahara and been rescued by Tuaregs.

You know, she was the stuff of legend already.

And when these two met and fell in love immediately, that gave

the German government the dream couple, basically.

It was beyond Posh and Becks of the 1930s.

And of course, this is just gold dust for Goebbels.

They are the embodiment of this new rise of the Aryans,

which is all part of the kind of National Socialist shtick.

So you had Rosemeyer, the golden boy

against Caracciola, the older man, the establishment man...

...who happened to drive the Mercedes Benz.

And it was the old guard that won in 1935 with Caracciola's Mercedes

winning the Grand Prix Championship. 1936 would be a different story.

1936 is this golden year for the Nazis in terms of sport,

because they've got the Olympics.

And although it is true that Jesse Owens wins the sprints,

you know, the Germans do really, really well.

It is an incredible advert for the emergence and the dominance

of Nazi Germany on the world scene.

They built the Olympic stadium, which was spectacular

and has that kind of Albert Speer, National Socialist, look about it.

It was a breathtaking place before anybody even stepped into it.

What weren't they achieving?

Rosemeyer wins the Grand Prix championship.

We have boxing, Max Schmeling beating Joe Louis.

A really shock result at Madison Square Garden in New York.

You can't separate these efforts and results in sport from the regime.

By winning, they are put together and you can't separate them.

Another success story of the Olympics was Germany's emerging

Autobahn Network, which allowed competitors and spectators to travel

across the country with great ease.

Its true purpose, however, was very different.

Germany lies in the centre of Europe, which means it's

vulnerable to attack from multiple different angles.

The worry is how do you get an army from the eastern side of Germany

to the western side very quickly?

So you build these huge autobahns, these multiple lanes

where you can just chuck loads and loads of traffic down them.

A military road, following in the tradition of the Romans.

I mean, that is the inspiration.

But suddenly there is this added benefit.

You can suddenly start using them for another reason and

obviously some bright spark goes, "Hey, here's an idea.

"Let's do some world speed tests on them and see if we can't get

"another record, which we can then use as propaganda around the world."

And it is genius, really.

The first person to utilise the autobahn was Hans Stuck,

who broke five world distance records in his Auto Union, including

covering 100 miles in just 36 minutes.

Mercedes and Rudi Caracciola struck back with a headline-grabbing,

new flying mile public road world record of 228mph.

This set up the first Autobahn head-to-head with Bernd Rosemeyer.

By then, the stage was set.

If they were selling Silver Arrows football shirts in Berlin

in the 1930s, they'd have all had Caracciola or Rosemeyer on the back.

It was that defined.

1937 saw the introduction of the Reich record week,

where Mercedes Benz and Auto Union ran their latest supercar creations

at the highest speeds ever seen on public roads.

Really, they've outgrown traditional motorsport.

We've won every kind of bit of motor racing we can do.

We've the lap record at every single track.

'36 Grand Prix at Donnington,

they were booed by the crowd to slow down, because it was just

becoming a farce.

Now they created their own space race, which is how fast

could they go and where could they do it?

And they had the perfect environment.

It was a rivalry on two levels.

A rivalry between the teams Auto Union and Mercedes

who were striving to come up with the most streamlined car.

You know, these amazing new machines.

And between the two leading drivers, Rudi Caracciola

and Bernd Rosemeyer who really were going head to head all the time

in this record-breaking effort.

The 1937 Mercedes record car was based on their latest 5.6l

supercharged V12 Grand Prix car and was first to run.

Despite having an engine with 700bhp, the car created

too much lift at high speeds, causing the front wheels to come

off the ground.

It just became more life-threatening

and more dangerous every time they ran.

Caracciola got to 235.5 miles per hour

before refusing to drive the car again.

It wasn't like land speed record setting where you went basically

in a desert.

These were motorways, 25 feet wide.

You know, you went off, you'd hit something and hurt yourself.

With Caracciola's Mercedes out of the game, this left the door

open for Auto Union.

400km an hour on a motorway.

252 miles an hour.

After that, he was extremely stressed, exhausted

and at the verge of losing his consciousness.

But it had to end somehow.

This madness had to end somehow.

January 1938, it all starts again.

The space race has reached

a new level of complexity in engineering.

Zeppelin wind tunnels, every possible bit of Nazi 1930s

technology available was thrown at the speed record cars.

Mercedes turned up with a revised car and with Rudolf Caracciola,

their number one driver. Auto Union came with Bernd Rosemeyer,

their number one, and also a very heavily-revised car

which used the kind of ground effect.

It was trying to use the way the air flowed under the car,

to hold the air in, to hold the car down.

And, in fact, it was about 40 years ahead of its time.

This is all about the plaudits of going to the Berlin Motor Show.

The Fuhrer would be there.

The newest Mercedes would be there.

And it had to be about the prize giving, the plaudits of the Fuhrer.

You had to go in both directions and take the average.

So if you were doing the flying mile, you set off,

you were timed at the beginning of a mile and at the end.

Then you turned round at the end,

came back within a certain time limit,

and your time for both runs was measured and averaged out.

The stretch of motorway that they were on

was absolutely flat and absolutely straight.

But on either side it had woods and some walls.

But it had breaks in the woods, breaks in the walls.

And this being winter, you know, the conditions were not perfect.

But they had to do it just in time for the opening

of the Berlin Motor Show in order to present Hitler

a new German record on the Autobahn.

Caracciola went on first in the Mercedes

and noticed a crosswind.

Lethal, at 260-plus miles per hour. For the flying mile,

he managed the speed of 268mph.

An astonishing figure. And of course, that set

up the challenge for Auto Union and for Rosemeyer.

Out went Rosemeyer in this newly-developed, much-improved

C-Type Auto Union, streamliner speed record car. And he picked

up the same wind.

He was up to the speed that would have matched or beaten Caracciola,

when he came to the bit of the mile where Caracciola

had noticed the problem.

It was a break in the trees and the crosswind of maybe 60 or 70mph.

But when you're doing 270mph, a crosswind would have a really serious effect.

He tried to correct and probably overcorrected.

This lightweight aluminium superstar electron machine went

into the trees and was torn apart.

Rosemeyer was found with effectively not a mark on him.

But he was dead.

Suddenly, this hero had been snuffed out.

The death of Rosemeyer can only really be attributed to one other

motor racing fatality of the modern era.

And that's Ayrton Senna.

It was a national tragedy.

\ The hero lost. I

By the time Rosemeyer died in the speed record attempt,

he'd been weaponised as a motor racing driver for the military

aspirations that Hitler then was harbouring.

Rosemeyer was the role model.

Be tough, be hard, be strong, be courageous.

Even if you die, you die for your country.

And his funeral was a huge national propaganda event organised

and hosted by the SS.

This was not what his widow wanted, but Hitler got his way and gave

Rosemeyer a big funeral with full military honours and swastikas

everywhere, and he sent a personal message to Rosemeyer's widow.

"May your grief be lessened by the knowledge that your husband

"died fighting for Germany."

Fighting for Germany? Trying to break a speed record? Maybe.

Rosemeyer's death unfortunately overshadowed the absolute

technological feats that Caracciola in that same event achieved.

On the Autobahn, in his speed record attempt,

an average speed on the flying mile of

just under 270mph.

Maxing out at over

270mph in 1938.

This public road world record would stand for 79 years.

The point of all this record breaking really was to lead

eventually to setting a new outright world land speed record for any kind

of wheeled vehicle on any surface.

Obviously something bigger and better was needed

and Mercedes had a plan.

Under the cloak of secrecy of Mercedes,

Dr Ferdinand Porsche was working on a new radical car that was a pet

project of Hitler himself.

An attack on the outright land speed record codenamed the T80.

A vehicle way beyond the public road record cars, a six wheeled

projectile powered by a 44,5l V12 engine

originally designed for use in Nazi fighter planes.

The target, Britain's land speed record of 369.7mph held

by John Cobb.

It looked like something from Buck Rogers.

It looked like something from NASA in the '60s.

It was like no-one had ever seen anything like the T80.

Everything Hitler does, he wants it to be the biggest, the best.

And it's the same with motor racing.

You know, it's got to be the biggest and the best.

And he's got all these land records, but he hasn't got the big one.

He hasn't got the ultimate. The fastest land vehicle ever.

And so much money and time and effort is put into this, even

though, you know, the war clouds are building and frankly, the cash

that is invested in this would be much better served going into other areas.

But that's not the Hitlerian way.

The Hitlerian way is, "This is something I want to do.

"We have to do it."

It would have been the ultimate end to the dominance

of the Silver Arrow era.

And it's so nearly ready.

But then comes the start of the war.

Germany invades Poland on September 1st.

But it is not part of the Nazi plans for it to

turn into a global conflict.

So we've just sort of a staggering arrogance. They just think,

"You know, we haven't quite got time to do it in 1939, but don't worry,

"we'll do it in 1940."

You know, little appreciating, you know, just what is being unleashed.

And ironically during 1940, the Battle of Britain, the engines

for the T80 had to be recycled back into the Luftwaffe to be put

into aeroplanes to try and attack the RAF.

So the few might have known that they won the Battle of Britain

and saved this country from invasion.

But maybe they didn't quite know

they also held on to the outright land speed record for us, as well.

It was the greatest thing that never happened.

But would it have happened?

Located at the home of British Motorsport lies a company capable

of unlocking the secrets to whether the T80 could have been the first

370mph land speed car.

TotalSim is an aerodynamic consulting company.

We mostly use computers to simulate aerodynamics and fluid flow.

We've worked in just about every motorsport series you can think of.

We've diversified into other areas

of sports, such as bobsleigh,

cycling, things where drag is important,

including downhill skiing and snowboarding.

We've done a number of speed record vehicles, motorbikes

in the past and they've only got a fixed amount of power.

And that power has got to overcome rolling resistance and drag.

So minimum drag, minimum rolling resistance.

But the question is often one of stability.

So getting to the speed is one thing, but not getting

into a wobble... That's the tricky bit.

Using historical design drawings and photos, TotalSim were able

to construct a virtual T80.

After applying the weight and power outputs that the T80

would have been capable of, it is then possible to calculate

whether the last of Hitler's supercars

was able to beat the 369.7mph

needed to take the outright land speed record.

So the results of the modelling show several things.

This first animation shows the energy over the car.

Anything that's not red is energy lost.

So the car is actually very efficient.

The drag is low and it cuts through the air far more efficiently

than a Formula 1 car does.

We've taken the drag numbers and we've made some pessimistic

assumptions on transmission efficiency.

Pessimistic assumptions on rolling resistance.

It's reasonable to assume that on the Autobahn, the speed

it would have achieved would have been in excess of 375mph.

So we think it would it would have broken the record.

By 5mph, the T80 would have been

a world record holder.

But that's not the full story.

The next image we look at here shows the distribution of downforce,

how hard the car is pushing into the ground.

And what we can see is the red at the front is creating lift

and the blues and purples at the rear are creating downforce.

And what's interesting about that, although it makes downforce,

it makes that downforce more towards the rear of the car.

But what's key is that that centre of pressure, that centre of force

is behind the rear axle, which is going to lift the nose.

And that means at some speed, it's going to go...and fly.

T80 was yet again a potentially deadly, but world leading feat

of engineering, a full stop on seven years

and over 33 million Reichsmarks

of Nazi government investment.

But how should the engineers and drivers

of these machines be judged?

If you're interested to wage war, you have to have technicians,

engineers and all these guys who worked

in the automotive industry

would later on construct airplanes, weapons and improving the techniques

of waging war.

There'll always, in that sense, be an asterisk

against their achievements that, you know, they did what they did

because they were given funding by a government that had a purpose

in mind and was using them towards that purpose.

You have to accept that motor racing drivers in the 1930s,

whatever their politics, were incredibly courageous people.

You have to sort of say, "OK, what we know now, post-war,

"what people knew, certainly in the second half of the war

"and what people knew in the 1930s."

And they're all quite different things.

The right thing, the wrong thing.

Who was involved and who knew what will never be known.

But what we do know is what was achieved.

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