[popdonnelly]

A truly great and historic car.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

Cool story. Awesome cars!

[July 4th]

Each car had a rear, three-litre engine providing 485 brake horse power. The power of some models was not equalled until the early 1980s and turbo-charged Formula One cars.

485 bhp for a car at that time in absolutely incredible.

[null and void]

I thought this was going to be about the Bug...

[cmsgop]

So Auto Union=AUDI ???

Is that right ?

[xcamel]

I always knew my Audi S4 had good roots

[sittnick]

Look at those front wheels! How does it steer?

[truth_seeker]

In Germany, Audi is highest rated, above Mercedes and BMW.

Audi is the company which lives today from the line of companies which built this car.

[Calpernia]

VW was also

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC4NwBl2U9A

[Brilliant]

"The car's genesis dates back to the 1930s when Adolf Hitler provided the funds for two companies, Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz, to start producing racing cars..."




Proof that Hitler was a socialist.

[Wilhelm Tell]

Fascinating story, thanks.

[hemogoblin]

Porsche's efforts at tank design were not so successful, however:

[ARE SOLE]

What a beauty ...

[Clemenza]

Ping!

[jeddavis]

If you don't have to worry about cooling a two-stroke engine, the amount of horsepower you can get out of it is almost limitless. At one point as I've heard it Auto Union was working on a pancake 8-cylinder 2-stroke which was producing something like 700 - 800 hp at about 1500 cc but they never found a complete solution to cooling it.

[nicollo]

A spokesman for Christie's in Paris, said: "The 1939 Auto Union could well break the record. It is more important that the Bugatti Royale, which is a fantastic car, but the Auto Union has everything.

Insipid salesmanship alone could lead any serious commentator to dare suggest that there exists a greater automobile than the original "Bug," the Bugatti Royale.

Our Christie's spokesman should just go away and forever for it. Sorry, Dorothy, but there's no comparison. The AU was a state-sponsored project; the Royale was a defiantly individualistic project born of individual genius. In technique, design, manufacture, and history there is none other than the Royal Bug.

For God's sake, it was not only the largest car ever built from ground-up, it's cylinders, making some 800+ cu. in., were bored out of a solid cast. The machine was unreal, unimaginable, and entirely unrepeatable.

Every modern racer is another '39 AU. No one could ever recreate a Royale:

[JWinNC]

"three-litre engine providing 485 brake horse power"

Dang... 485 HP out of 3 liters in 1937? Is that correct? That's 160 HP per liter. A Rolls Royce Merlin V-12 supercharged 27 liter aircraft engine only made 50-60 HP per liter.

jw

[FreedomCalls]

At the end of the war the Auto Union team's cars, which are believed to have been hidden in a mineshaft in Germany, were found by the Russians who took them back to the Soviet Union so that engineers could study their technology.

So they did. And all they could come up with based that study was the Lada?

[proudpapa]

Volkswagen = Hitlers Revenge.