70 years ago: Richard von Frankenberg and the miraculous escape from the crash on the Avus

The young man, who was born in Darmstadt in 1922, initially had a very long name: Richard-Alexander Ruthard Edi Wolf Eberhard von Frankenberg und Ludwigsdorff. He came from an old Silesian noble family, but later shortened his name to three concise words.

His life, however, was also very varied, as his son Cypselus von Frankenberg – one of my former colleagues in the BMW press department – once told me.

‘My father wasn’t just married three times; he also had various careers: first he studied mechanical engineering, worked for the BBC in England after the war, later served as a press spokesman at Porsche, was a journalist and author of several specialist books, and occasionally presented on television. But his true passion lay in motor racing, which he had apparently taken up in 1948 on a BMW motorbike – a year before he even held a licence to compete.”

“Just two years later, he was competing in his first rallies and circuit races in Porsche sports cars, and from 1953 he was part of the Zuffenhausen-based company’s works team. He mostly drove a near-production Porsche 356 or, later, the Type 550 in coupé and Spyder forms, with which he competed on several occasions in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, amongst other events. In 1955, he won the German Sports Car Championship title and, in the same year, was awarded the so-called ‘Silver Laurel Leaf’ by the then Federal President Theodor Heuss – a very special honour for a sportsman.”

But what surely remained even more vividly in his memory was a very different experience on 16 September 1956. On that occasion, the speedy aristocrat lined up for the final race of the season at Berlin’s Avus circuit in a special version of the Porsche Spyder 550 A – the Spyder prototype 645, known internally at the factory as ‘Mickey Mouse’. Its nickname stemmed from its sometimes abrupt handling, as the car’s short wheelbase meant it could very quickly switch from understeer to oversteer.

Von Frankenberg vor dem Start auf der Avus

Foto: Porsche

Thanks to a lightweight tubular frame and a magnesium body, this compact racing car weighed just 550 kilograms, produced around 160 PS from a 1.5-litre engine, and reached an incredible top speed of 260 km/h for its time.

Whilst von Frankenberg, ever the professional, went into this race without a care in the world – on a track featuring two long motorway straights leading up to the Südkurve, as well as a steep bend made of clinker bricks at the other end – one loyal fan was clearly very worried about him. For he wrote him a letter with a touching message: ‘Don’t take any risks, wear a wide belt, and don’t be reckless in the banked bend.’

To put this into context – back then, racing drivers didn’t yet wear professional overalls; they started the race in normal everyday clothes, wearing only a helmet on their heads, with no seatbelt at all.

Perhaps, as was later speculated, this fact may even have saved Richard von Frankenberg’s life at the time. As for the accident itself, the well-known motorsport journalist Günther Molter, who witnessed it first-hand, described it as follows: “In the middle of the steep bend, von Frankenberg was driving quite high up on the track when, without any visible warning or skidding, his car suddenly veered off to the right. It shot out over the low kerb at the top of the bend at an angle of about 20 degrees, rose another two metres or so and then rolled over in mid-air. As it did so, the car grazed a tree, and the driver was thrown from the vehicle.”

It was a huge shock for everyone involved. Whilst the Porsche was ablaze in the paddock after the impact, the first priority was to search for von Frankenberg. Eventually, a Porsche employee found him lying in the bushes, apparently without any external injuries, his helmet still on his head. He had been incredibly lucky to have survived the accident without serious physical injury, although he still had to spend five weeks in a Berlin hospital due to severe soft-tissue injuries.

This did not deter the speedy man from Silesia – who had long since made his home in Tübingen, Swabia, and always travelled from there to Porsche in Zuffenhausen to, amongst other things, oversee the Porsche in-house magazine *Christophorus* – from driving fast.

As early as March 1957, he was a driver in the team that set three new world records on the high-speed circuit at Monza in a Porsche 356. In the same year, he also competed at Le Mans once more, this time in the new Porsche Spyder 718, and took part in several hill climbs. His final motorsport appearance was in 1960 at the airfield race in Innsbruck, where he finished fourth in a Porsche 356.

The gentleman racing driver then devoted himself primarily to the media, testing cars and running a number of driver training courses; he became known throughout Germany for his remark that accidents often happened because there were too many ‘Sunday drivers’ on the roads.

His own fatal accident, however, occurred on a Tuesday, 13 November 1973. In drizzling rain, von Frankenberg was travelling from Stuttgart towards Heilbronn in his Porsche 911 S on the motorway when suddenly a delivery van in front of him skidded and veered into the left-hand lane – the collision was unavoidable at a speed of 170. And so, after just 51 years, ended the career of a man who had already created his own legend during his lifetime.