[Not long ago, I picked up a copy of the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday New York Times of 30 November 2025 which I’d laid aside to read later. In “Metropolitan Diary,” a weekly column in the Times that features short, reader-submitted stories about life in New York City, I was intrigued by the very first offering:
Snappy Driver
dear diary:
As an ad man in the 1960s, I used to regularly go to a restaurant called Le Chanteclair on East 49th Street between Fifth and Madison.
The place was adorned with car racing trophies and memorabilia, and the man who ran the front of the house was from France and always elegantly dressed.
Not long ago, I picked up a book at the library called “Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best.”
Turns out the elegant Frenchman at Le Chanteclair was René Dreyfus, the driver who beat Hitler’s best.
neil fox
[What attracted me was the reference to the Jewish race car driver who beat Hitler. I had to look that up and find out more about René Dreyfus and what race or races he won against Nazi drivers. (The online version is entitled “Metropolitan Diary: ‘It Was the Start of a Frosty Relationship.’”) Here’s what I learned:]
In the book Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best by Neal Bascomb (Mariner Books, 2020), the author recounts how French driver René Dreyfus and American heiress Lucy Schell's team (Écurie Bleue), driving a French-made Delahaye 145, beat the Nazi-backed German Silver Arrows (Silberpfeile) teams, whose drivers included the legendary Rudolf Caracciola, driving Mercedes-Benzes, in the 1938 Pau Grand Prix in a town of 78,600 in southern France, 31 miles (50 kilometers) from Spain.
(Écurie literally means ‘stable,’ referring to horses, and it can also refer to a ‘team’ of horses. In motorsport, however, it can mean ‘team’; Écurie Bleue would be Team Blue. In other instances of a sports or work team, the correct French word would be équipe.)
This victory was a significant morale boost for the French and a symbolic blow to the Nazis’ claims of Aryan supremacy, reportedly leading Hitler’s regime to attempt to erase all records of the race after their invasion of France in 1940.
René Albert Dreyfus (1905-93), according to Rodney Walkerley, a British reporter who covered motor sports, had “The Look—a stare of searing intensity and undying affection that lets you know, without a doubt, Dreyfus was put on Earth to drive cars fast” (exact source unknown). Nick Donofrio, the New York Times researcher for Special Projects who reviewed Bascomb’s book, called him “a Max Baer of the asphalt, Jesse Owens on wheels” (“The Need for Speed,” New York Times Book Review 31 May 2020).
(Walkerley (1905-82) wrote for Motor Sport from 1927 and The Light Car from 1930. He also wrote several books, including Grand Prix 1934-1939 [1950] and Moments That Made Racing History [1959].)
A nearly fatal accident, and the loss of several friends on the circuit, destroyed Dreyffus’s confidence. The crash, often cited as nearly ending his career, occurred on 14 April during the 1932 Grand Prix of Comminges in a privately-owned Bugatti. Dreyfus hit a patch of road where another driver had just crashed in a downpour. His car skidded, hit a tree, became airborne, and flipped, throwing him onto the road. He was hospitalized with a severely injured shoulder and various cuts, but recovered to eventually join the Bugatti factory team.
Then, with the rise of fascism in Europe—Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor [prime minister] of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936—he was banned from competing with the best teams and the fastest cars—Maserati, Alfa Romeo, and Mercedes—because he was Jewish. An unlikely partnership with an American race enthusiast and a floundering French auto manufacturer would see his faith in himself return. To beat the Hitler-supported Silver Arrows, however, Dreyfus would have to find reason, and purpose, to risk everything. It’s a story of faith and redemption, set on the perilous stage of motorsport with a backdrop of Nazi arrogance.
Born in Paris, the only child of an American industrialist, Lucy O’Reilly Schell (1896-1952) could have spent her life in the luxury which the wealth of her family made possible. Instead, she volunteered to be a nurse during World War I, and when peace broke, she turned to racing cars. A skilled driver, she broke with convention to become a top Monte Carlo Rally driver.
Hitler’s Silver Arrows (so-named for their burnished-aluminum bodies) on the rise, she sought a new challenge, namely toppling the Nazis from their perch atop motor racing. She started her own Grand Prix team—the first, and only, woman to do so—then financed with her inherited millions the construction of a formula car from scratch. She chose a down-on-its-luck French firm named Delahaye to build her car and selected René Dreyfus to be her champion.
After ascending to power, Adolf Hitler declared that Germany would soon reign supreme in Grand Prix motor racing. Success there would prove the might and prowess of the Third Reich—and help spur the “cavalry of the future.” This Third Reich propaganda phrase was a reference to the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, or NSKK).
The NSKK was a paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party, conceived to train a host of men in driving and motoring skills, establishing the foundation of a mechanized army. The organization was very effective in providing manpower for the Wehrmacht’s motorized infantry divisions.
Hitler envisioned the NSKK units, mounted on motorcycles and in motor vehicles, as a highly mobile, spearhead force, ideal for reconnaissance and fast deployment, fulfilling the traditional light cavalry missions of scouting and quickly positioning troops, but with the speed and technology of motorization rather than horses. Tanks and other armored vehicles were already fulfilling the traditional heavy cavalry role of shock troops.
Toward this end, the German war machine spurred—and subsidized—the German automotive industry to develop and manufacture the highest quality vehicles possible, and domination of motorsport was the first test of that capacity. Also integral in Hitler’s plan for a “motorized Germany” was building a nationwide highway system (the Autobahns) and putting every German family in its own automobile (the Volkswagen, or “People’s Car).
To accomplish this scheme, the Führer funneled millions to Daimler-Benz and Auto Union, the two lead auto manufacturers, who then recruited their country’s best drivers to the task of victory. Foremost among them was Remagen-born Otto Wilhelm Rudolf Caracciola (1901-59).
Although an unflappable race driver, Caracciola had a killer instinct that had made him the top racer in the world. Matched with the Silver Arrow race cars built by Mercedes, he was all but unstoppable year after year, winning three European championships between 1935 and 1938. He became the standard-bearer of Nazi dominance of the Grand Prix, raising his arm in a Nazi salute after each win and featuring in Reich propaganda that labeled its drivers, “swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, strong as Krupp steel.” He was the perfect rival for René Dreyfus.
They were the unlikeliest of heroes. René Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams—and fastest cars—by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage. Charles Weiffenbach (1870-1959), head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye (1894-1954), was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink. And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, whose fortune came from the construction business and subsequent industrial investments, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days. ($1 million in 1938 would be worth $23 million today.
As Nazi Germany, with its obsession with fast cars and Hitler’s plans to motorize Germany’s civilian population as well as its Wehrmacht, launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day—but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.
Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during one of history’s darkest hours. In the opening race of the 1938 season on 10 April—the Anschluß, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, had been just 25 days earlier, on 12 March—Dreyfus drove the Delahaye to a shocking upset of Caracciola and Mercedes in the Pau Grand Prix.
The race (as recorded on The Golden Era of Grand Prix Racing)
[Rudi] Caracciola took the lead of the race followed by [René] Dreyfus, [Maurice] Trintignant [French; 1917-2005], [Dioscoride] Lanza [Italian; 1898-1977], [Gianfranco] Comotti [Italian; 1906-63], “Raph” [Georges Raphaël Béthenod de Montbressieux (Argentinian; 1910-94)] and Matra [Yves “Yves-Marie” Martin (French; 1911-84)]. On the twisty Pau street track Dreyfus was able to keep pace with the leader and actually pass. Caracciola re-passed but by now the Mercedes team must have known what would happen. The fuel consumption of the Delahaye was about half of that of the supercharged Mercedes cars and the track had become slippery from oil and rubber making it impossible for Caracciola to use the power advantage of the Mercedes-Benz. With half of the race gone Caracciola came into the pits for fuel. The braking and gear changing on the Pau track had got Caracciola's old leg injury to make itself known and he gave over the car to [Hermann] Lang [German; 1909-87]. Dreyfus took over the lead never to be challenged again as he was running on a nonstop strategy. Lang’s car developed plug trouble but it is unlikely that the Mercedes team would have won that day even with a healthy car. The team had to admit that they had been beaten squarely and fairly. So Dreyfus went on to a sensational victory, taking the flag almost 2 minutes in front of Lang. Comotti was third in the other Delahaye followed by “Raph”’s Maserati.
(Caracciola had suffered a life-altering leg injury during a practice run for the 1933 Monaco Grand Prix. Driving an Alfa Romeo for his own privately owned team and car [i.e., not an official, factory-backed team], a brake failure caused him to crash violently into a stone wall at a turn. The crash resulted in multiple fractures to his right thigh and hip, and he spent six months in a plaster cast from the waist down and was confined to a wheelchair. His doctors initially told him he’d never race again.
(Despite the disability, Caracciola returned to win three European Championships (1935, 1937, 1938). However, the old injury continued to plague him. His right leg healed roughly two inches (five centimeters) shorter than his left, leaving him with a lifelong limp. At Pau, the physical toll of braking and gear changing on his weakened leg forced him to hand over his car to a teammate.)
That year, Dreyfus was named the Race Champion of France.
Dreyfus had won the Grand Prix of Monaco in 1930; from 1925 to 1950, he’d become an international race driver of such excellence that he was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of the French Republic: 1959-69) in the early 1960’s.
In 1940, Dreyfus came to the United States on special leave from the French Army, which he’d joined as a truck driver when the war started, to drive for France in the Indianapolis 500. He placed 10th in the race. He didn’t return to France after the race, joined the U.S. Army in 1942, after Germany invaded France two years earlier, serving as an interrogator in the Italian campaign. He later brought his family to the United States and became a citizen in 1945, after World War II.
He founded Le Chanteclair at 18 East 49th Street off Madison Avenue (Manhattan’s Midtown East) in 1952 and for 25 years was one of the more popular dining locales for international auto racers. The restaurant had the ambience of urban sophistication combined with the warmth of a French country inn.
Dreyfus and his brother Maurice (1904-94), who ran the front of the house, were known for greeting patrons warmly and remembering their names, making everyone feel like an old friend. The restaurant served classic and haute French cuisine and was well-regarded for its traditional French repertoire and extensive wine cellar.
Le Chanteclair closed in the mid-1970s. René Dreyfus, who was born in Nice, died at 88 of an aortic aneurysm at New York Hospital in Manhattan. In 1983, he published a memoir, My Two Lives: Race Driver to Restaurateur by René Dreyfus and Beverly R. Kimes (Aztex Corp).
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