Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

t.O 00 O"l The NSU factory as it looked in 1946. Underneath all that there was a supercharged racer to be found. Schorsch Meier (BMW) and Heiner Fleischmann (NSU) dueling at Hockenheim. shortly before the accident that cost several spectators their lives. Wilhelm Hen and NSU: From ruins to records By Jan Leek That a racing engine even in its 20th year is able to break world records must be seen as unique, especially in an age when racing motorcycles are obsolete 10 seconds after the checkered flag has dropped on the last race of the season. In the year 1936 English'. man Walter Moore, chIef de- 10 Wilhelm Herz with the NSU 350 at Nurburgring in 1949. signer at the German NSU factory, sketched the idea for a supercharged twin·cylinder engine on the back of a pack of cigarettes. In 1937 the job was assigned to chief designer Albert Rode~ and in 1938 the new machine madeltsdebu·~onaracetrack.In 1951 the same engme was used for a new land speed record 10 Germany. In 1956 a streamliner was built around the engine and taken to Bonneville Salt Flats where it produced another record. This engine would never have gotten a chance to prove itself if it wasn't for one man who through the Second' World War did little but think of possible modifications on this same engine and after his release from a Russian prisoner of war camp picked up a bicycle and pedalled his way to the NSU factory site and started dig· ging in the bombed out ruins. We'll take it from the beginning. In the 1930s MOlO Guzzi. BMW and Husqvama prov~ that a twincylinder engine with a given capacity produced more power than a single. The only factories not to cherish the idea were the English and SU had more or less brought Walter Moore from England and Moore was work· ing after the English recipe. He had, before he came to NSU, constructed the Nonon CSI, the forerunner of the Manx, and the similarity between the NSU singles and the Nonons is more than apparent. He finally saw the writing on the wall and the sketch on the pack of cigarettes was the first step on the way to find the missing horsepower. It didn't quite turn out the way he figured. In August of 1938 the new machine made its debut at the German GP on Saclisenring. It was hot and the new machine turned out to be heavy, very heavy, about 440 pounds. Heiner Fleischmann did not finish due to a broken bolt in the front forks. This was a 350cc machine and the factory's press release gave the horsepower figure of 45 which was only partially true as the compressor used up about nine of those. A raging success it wasn't. In the next outing Fleischmann upped the lap record by about 10 mph and won the race which was held at Hockenheim. Unfortunately, NSU decided they had a good thing going and did not modify the 'machines for the next season, apart from fitting them with larger tanks, due to the enormous thirst of the heavy monsters. They also hired four riders for a complete team: Englishman John White, and Germans Ouo Ruhrschneck, Karl Bodmer and Wil· helm Herz. In the first race of the season Whi te was fourth and the others broke. The best result that year was a third for White in Hamburg and then the war carIM!. Several explanations were presented for the failure to produce good results that year, but today it is painfully clear that the fault was with the compressor, bought from England on Moore's insistent explanations that "only the English have built proper compressor units." That the engine itself lacked power was never discussed. In the period between 193.9 and 1945 twO things happened. Man is never so clever as w hen he tries to destroy himself. War drives technical progress forward at a rate which would be impo sible in peacetime. Germany's dream about a world imperium reached all fronts and the technical institutes did not only work with rockets and other forms of des· tructive weapons systems. From March 1940 till June 1941 Die Tech· nische Hochschule in Stuttgart usedJ that particular racing engine from NSU to develop supercharging. They found that the output was less than impressive, 37 hp, and started look· ing for the missing ones. They found them! New inlets and a new loadchamber gave five hp. Cooling fins on the compressor and inlet tracts and a new shape of the heads finally pushed the output to an astounding 70 hpl The problem was pressure; the supercharger couldn't quite produce what it was supposed to do. A Roots supercharger borrowed from DaimlerBenz was tried but a Zehtrix charger finally proved right. After Stalingrad

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