STEALING SPEED: The biggest spy scandal in motorsport history by Mat Oxley

Author:Mat Oxley [Oxley, Mat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mat Oxley
Published: 2014-06-23T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter ten

Like the devil was after him

In the high noon of a Swedish late-summer Sunday Walter Kaaden smiled happily at the little man who was going to make all his dreams come true. The previous afternoon Ernst Degner had proved that the MZ was running at the peak of its powers, comfortably out-pacing the Hondas during practice at Kristianstad. Phillis was second but more than two seconds slower, the Australian could feel the world title slipping away. All Degner had to do on race day was repeat that performance 16 laps in a row and he would be as good as world champion, MZ too.

That same Saturday afternoon an MZ truck had travelled north to Berlin, with venerable Zschopau technician Erich Bergauer at the wheel and an MZ 125 in the back. The following evening Bergauer would be interviewed live on state television as the Party celebrated the success of Degner and MZ which, more importantly, was the triumph of the GDR people, of communism itself. The front page of Monday’s edition of the state newspaper Neues Deutschland had already been typeset, *1 declaring the defeat of those decadent western imperialists. At government headquarters there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that anything was going to go wrong.

Shortly before the start of the race Kaaden checked humidity and barometric pressure for the final time, it was more vital than ever that his two-strokes ran sweet and crisp. If they ran too rich, Degner would get beaten, if they ran too lean, his engine would disintegrate. Kaaden nonetheless felt confident as he watched his faithful mechanics tend their machines, checking, rechecking, making final adjustments. The Zschopau race shop had once again got everything rolling for the weekend, scraping together every last piece of competitive hardware to match Honda’s entry of five machines for this crunch race. Every single point that they could take away from Phillis would be vital.

Kaaden had also convinced his superiors to expand MZ’s renkollectiv for the weekend, the state unusually granting visas to allow extra mechanics out of the country. All in all, the MZ contingent had grown to 22 people at Kristianstad, more than double its usual size. And just in case things didn’t go to plan in Sweden, Kaaden had also persuaded the GDR authorities to finance the team’s trip to the season finale in Buenos Aires, the first Grand Prix in history to take place outside Europe.

Alan Shepherd and Finnish ace Jukka Petaja took charge of the fourth and fifth MZs, joining Degner and his factory team-mates Musiol and Brehme. There were bikes with forward-facing exhausts, bikes with rearward-facing exhausts, all of them painted in MZ’s traditional silver livery. And then there was Degner’s machine, furnished with every trick bit the factory could afford and polished to a winning gleam.

As always at races, Kaaden was out of his factory overalls, ever the elegant team manager in immaculate jacket and tie, happily chatting with journalists anxious to know how the great man felt as MZ stood on the cusp of world championship success.

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