NSU Ro80 - The Complete Story (eBook)

Martin Buckley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
176 Seiten
The Crowood Press (Verlag)
978-0-7198-4175-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Launched in 1967, the NSU Ro80 had modern aerodynamic styling, a technologically advanced Wankel rotary engine and was voted Car of the Year in 1968. However, after the initial positive reception, the car developed a reputation for unreliability, with problems arising as early as 15,000 miles and many vehicles required a rebuilt engine before 30,000 miles. Despite the company resolving these reliability issues in both existing and new vehicles, and offering a generous warranty, the damage to the car's reputation was done. The NSU Ro80 is the most celebrated motoring lost cause of the second half of the twentieth century, outranking the likes of the Edsel and the DeLorean because, unlike those statements of misplaced optimism and ego, it was a good car. Not just good: the NSU Ro80 is one of the great saloons. Launched in September 1967, the Ro80 was an all-new four-door five-seater from a West German company that - post-war - had never made anything other than economy runabouts, motorcycles and mopeds. That alone should have been enough of a risk, but this was also the world's first purpose-built Wankel-engined family saloon. This compact, refined and elegantly simple power unit was the first really new concept in the realm of internal combustion engines to achieve mass production for ninety years. A car like the Ro80 could only really have come from Germany, where there was a passion for research and a pride in engineering not found elsewhere in Europe. With front-wheel drive, superb power steering and four-wheel disc brakes, the car had top handling and driver appeal. Quite simply, it was a masterpiece, considered by many to be the finest vehicle of its type in the world. But with one fatal flaw: its engine. With over 300 archive photographs, drawings and diagrams, this book tells the story of the NSU

Born in 1966, Martin Buckley was brought up in Manchester and started writing about classic cars in the mid-1980s. He was been writing for Classic and Sportscar magazine since 1985 and is now senior contributor. He has owned upwards of 400 cars including five NSU Ro80s having bought his first in 1995. Martin has two children and lives in Gloucestershire with his wife Mia.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE

THE LITTLE PRINZ OF NECKARSULM

‘Obviously this new German challenger has been produced only after enormous thought: and in the minds of designers as well as buyers in all parts of the world it will provoke a very thoughtful reaction.’

The Motor road test of the NSU Prinz, 25 February 1959

Not far from Stuttgart, in the German state of Baden Wurttemberg, the city of Neckarsulm is located where the river Neckar meets the Sulm. It was a settlement of fewer than 4,000 hard-working, thrifty Swabian inhabitants in 1892, the year when Heinrich Stoll’s Neckarsulmer Radwerke adopted the acronym ‘NSU’ as the brand name for its bicycles. The original shield-shaped badge depicted the heraldic stags’ antlers of the former Kingdom of Wurttemberg and the cross of the Knights of the Teutonic order, who had a castle at Neckarsulm in the middle ages. Today, home to 26,000 residents, Neckarsulm is still a base for car manufacturing in the form of one of Volkswagen’s main German assembly plants, where it builds the larger Audi models on a 1.3 million square metre site to the tune of 160,000 cars per year.

The roots of NSU, like so many other turn-of-the-century car manufacturers, lie in bicycle making. Having established its engineering credentials as a maker of sewing machines in 1900, the firm built the first of the motorcycles that contributed so much to the fame of the marque around the world in the coming decades. By the mid-1950s NSU would become the largest producer of motorcycles in the world.

The 1956–62 250cc Supermax was derived from the Max and Spezialmax and featured improved rear suspension. In the 1950s NSU were the biggest motorcycle manufacturers in the world: production peaked in 1955 at 350,000.

NSU promoted its two-wheelers widely in competition through to the mid-1950s. Its unsupercharged 125 and 250cc Rennsport racing bikes were the fastest of their type in the world and won five world championships between 1953 and 1955.

Yet, before the end of the following decade, NSU would be part of the VW group. At the time of this uneasy merger (which was really a takeover), a few may have recalled that in the early 1930s it was NSU who had commissioned, in prototype form, the first iteration of Dr Porsche’s rear-engined wonder car. Others may have ruminated on the fact that the VW Beetle was not even a twinkle in Adolf Hitler’s eye when, in 1905, NSU supplemented the success of its two-wheelers (six different models were offered by 1904) with automobile production.

Surprisingly, NSU continued to produce pedal bikes until the 1960s.

The first Neckarsulm-built four-wheelers were to a Belgian design called the Pipe and produced under licence.

However, the first true all-NSU motor car did not appear until 1906 – the original 6/10 PS being quickly joined by the more powerful 15/24 PS.

These were conventionally engineered and relatively light four-cylinder, side-valve touring cars of between 1.3- and 4-litre capacity, which gave a good account of themselves in reliability trials and, after the 1914–18 war, in racing.A works team of three 5/15 NSUs won the 1923 Avusrennen; three years later, at the same venue, the six-cylinder, 30bhp cars swept the board with a 1/2/3/4 class win at an average speed only a few miles per hour short of Caracciola’s straight-eight Mercedes.

GERD STIELER VON HEYDEKAMPF 1905–1983

Born in Berlin, Gerd Stieler von Heydekampf was an engineer of Prussian military background whose wisdom and guidance were highly instrumental in bringing the Ro80 to fruition. Having gained his engineering doctorate in 1929, he spent the formative years of his career working in America, first with the industrial boiler makers Babcock and Wilcox and then at the Baldwin Locomotive Works before returning to Germany in a management position at Adam Opel in 1936.

Gerd Stieler von Heydekampf is the man behind the wheel.

The car and truck maker had been acquired by GM in 1929. Its new Brandenburg Works was Germany’s largest truck-making plant, producing 130,000 of the famous Opel Blitz commercial vehicles between 1935 and August 1944, when the plant was virtually obliterated by an RAF raid.These vehicles, thought latterly to have been built by forced labour, were used extensively by the German military during the war and were most infamously deployed as ‘Gas Vans’ during the holocaust, although there is no evidence that von Heydekampf knew anything of this – or could have done anything much about it if he did.

Already on the board of Opel, von Heydekampf was General Manager at Opel by 1938 before being hand-picked by Albert Speer in 1942 to run the Tank and Locomotive commission at Kassel, succeeding Dr Porsche, whose complex designs and constant technical changes were holding up production.As a Wehrwirtschaftsführer with responsibility for 60,000 workers, von Heydekampf was an important figure whose wartime activities guiding German tank production did not go unnoticed by the occupying Americans post-1945.When interrogated by the Combined Intelligence Objectives SubCommittee in June 1945, von Heydekampf was able to give a great deal of detail about the why and how of wartime German tank design and construction, even down to Hitler’s preference for air-cooled engines. He claimed that he had only joined the Nazi party in 1940 when it was suggested he did so by the local Nazi Gautier: other accounts say he joined up as early as 1933.

Towards the end of the war he conspired with Albert Speer against Hitler’s industrial ‘scorched earth’ policy.After the war – and a short spell in prison due to his well-known Nazi sympathies – von Heydekampf joined NSU as a consultant in 1948 then as a full employee in 1950, with responsibility for purchasing. In 1953 he joined the board, where he remained until a heart attack forced his retirement in 1971.

With his big cigars and mid-Atlantic accent, the good-natured and approachable von Heydekampf had a strong whiff of Detroit about him.Anxious to change NSU’s image he guided the firm not only through the highs and lows of the Wankel adventure – and merger with Audi – but also kept the production lines of the relatively small Neckarsulm factory humming in the face of seemingly irresistible 1950s and 1960s competition from the ever-greater strength of VW and the bottomless pockets of GM-funded Opel.

THE VW CONNECTION

By now NSU had a dedicated facility at Heilbronn making private cars, taxi cabs and light trucks. However, the economic situation in Germany had become so dire by the end of the 1920s that NSU were forced, in 1928, to sell the factory to the Italian manufacturer Fiat, which agreed to keep building NSUs on the site until 1932.

From 1930, alongside NSU models the Italians produced local versions of established Fiat vehicles on this site. During World War II they also assembled NSU/Fiat-badged cars for export markets, sometimes to specifications not found elsewhere in the Fiat empire.

When NSU built three prototypes of the Porsche-designed KdF VW in 1933 – the true predecessor to the eventual Wolfsburg Beetle – they fell foul of the contract they had with Fiat not to go into direct competition. So the original NSU corporate entity concentrated on making motorcycles, encouraged by the technology-focused Nazi regime to find advanced solutions, as evidenced by the overhead camshaft, supercharged machines it displayed at the Berlin motorcycle show in 1935.

A works team of NSUs won at Avusrennen in 1923 and 1926.

During the war, NSU’s contribution was to build half-tracked Opel Olympia-engined motorcycles for the army called the Kleines Kettenkraftrad or NSU HK100.

The factory avoided bombing damage until two weeks before the cessation of hostilities. After serving briefly as a repair facility for the allied forces, the Neckarsulm works returned to two-wheeler production with the 98cc Quick and the 4-stroke 100cc Fox, both of which were singlecylinder machines. NSU assembled Italian Lambrettas under licence between 1950 and 1956 and then built a successful range of scooters of their own design that stayed in production until 1964. NSU reintroduced its pre-war Konsul I and Konsul II 350 and 500cc models from 1951 to 1954, but found worldwide fame with its little 50cc Quickly moped, which at the height of its popularity was being built at the rate of 1,000 units per day.

NSU promoted its two-wheelers widely in competition through to the mid-1950s. Its unsupercharged 125 and 250cc Rennsport racing bikes were the fastest of their type in the world (with 125bhp per litre) and won five world championships between 1953 and 1955, before the factory bowed out of Grand Prix activity in the face of growing costs and a flagging domestic motorcycle market.

Record breaking was seen as a cheaper way of capturing attention: in 1956 the works team decamped to the Bonneville Salt Flats for a remarkable assault on six different capacity class motorcycle records with a set of cigar shaped streamliners, the 50, 100, 125 and 250cc machines deploying hammock-type seating positions. At 211mph (340km/h) the 500cc twin took the absolute world speed record for motorcycles by a full 26mph (42km/h).The 250cc Delphin III crashed at 195mph (314km/h), but the 350 was timed at 189.5 mph (304.9km/h), the 125 at 150.3mph (241.8km/h) and the 100cc bike at 138mph (222km/h).

That the 50cc Baumn streamliner topped 121mph (194.7km/h) is possibly the most amazing...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.2.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Auto / Motorrad
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Kinderbücher bis 11 Jahre
• Schlagworte: aerodynamics • air-cooled • Audi 100 • Bertone • Citroen GS Birotor • Classic Cars • Claus Luthe • Comotor • DKM • Ernest Hoppener • Ewald Praxl • Felix Wankel • Four cylinders • Gerd Stieler • Gerd von Heydekampf • Heilbronn • K70 • Kettenkraftrad • KKM • Mazda Cosmo • Mercedes • motoring • Neckarsulmer Radwerke • NSU 1000 • Pininfarina • Prinz • Rotary engine • Saloon • Skoda • Sports Prinz coupe • Stuart Bladon • Tiny Rowland • Twin rotor • Vaz 2101 • Volkswagen • VW • Walter Froede • Wankel engine • Wankel Spider • West Germany
• ISBN-10: 0-7198-4175-5 / 0719841755
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7198-4175-0 / 9780719841750