Today we head back to 1934 and that years Czech Grand Prix, officially called the Masarykuv Okruh, which was held at the fearsome Brno circuit on September 30th. This 29 km (18 mile) long cicuit was held on closed roads and was considered to be demanding and potentially dangerous even back in the perilous days of the 1930’s. The 1934 edition had entries from all the major teams of the era: Mercedes-Benz, Auto Union, Alfa Romeo (entered by Enzo Ferrari), Bugatti and Maserati. Of these it’s the Maserati team which we’ll be focusing on.
The Maserati entries.
Maserati bought two of their new cars, the 6C-34, to Brno. The 6C-34 had a 3.2-litre straight-6 supercharged engine and had made it’s debut at Monza 3 weeks earlier. One of cars was entered by the works team for Tazio Nuvolari, a very experienced and successful driver who is generally considered to be one of the all time greats. The second car was entered as a private entry by a driver with a very different pedigree: Josef Brazdil. Brazdil appears to be a complete novice, he ceratinly had no Grand Prix experience but he might have had some experience of racing at a local level. If so history has not recorded this. Either way he seemed to come out of nowhere and was almost certainly out of his depth driving a fast and powerful Grand Prix car on such a difficult circuit. Quite why the organisers has accepted his entry in these circumstances is unknown. Maybe they liked the idea of a local driver in a competitive car or maybe in an era when safety just wasn’t really thought about they just decided it was up to him to decide if he was up to the task.
How Brazdil ended up in the Maserati.
Brazdil was a local car mechanic and he had bought the Maserati direct from their Bologna factory. Originally he was down in the entry list as racing an Alfa Romeo, I can find no further details of this car but it suggests that the switch to the Maserati was a late one. What happened shortly before the start of practice point to the finances behind this deal being possibly suspect in some manner. The money had apparently come from Brazdil’s manager who was called Stefan Marcis. Exactly how the pair came into enough money for the Maserati is not known for sure but what is known is that both ended being jailed. Several versions of why and what happened next have been recorded. One version is that Marcis borrowed the money for the Maserati from his fiancee. The pair then broke up after a fight and the angry lady took legal action against Marcis and Brazdil in order to get the money back. The pair couldn’t pay and so ended up in jail. At this point Nuvolari, keen to see the second Maserati race, and Louis Chiron, another top driver, petitioned the local authorities to let Bradzil out of jail in order to race. The agreement being that he would return to jail afterwards. The second version is that the pair were jailed due to some other financial problems which might or might not have any connection to the Maserati. In this version Brazdil was bailed out by a mysterious blond lady who apparently spoke with an American accent. Who she was, or even if she existed, is as unknown as many other aspects of the tale. In truth she probably never existed and it’s more likely that Brazdil was released thanks to his fellow drivers.
Brazdil takes to the track.
Whatever the nature of Brazdil’s inprisonment and release he did get his chance to take part in practice. He and the Maserati duely went out for their first practice lap and then promptly dissapeared. Sadly this strange tale has a tragic ending. Brazdil had crashed on a straight section of circuit when he got two wheels in a ditch at 200 km/h (125 mph). 1930’s Grand Prix circuits were unreconisable compared to those of the 21st century and safety was not part of them. Brno took place on normal roads without barriers or anything else to stop cars hitting whatever was present by the side of the road if they went off course. The car hit a tree which directed it further into the woods where it hit a second one and was sent into a series of somersaults. Safety was not a feature of the Grand Prix cars of the time either and they had no roll bars or even seatbelts. Brazdil was thrown out and died at the scene with his spine being broken.
The cause of the crash.
The crash did not seem to have any obvious cause. An investigation found that the car had not suffered any kind of mechanical failure which might have caused it to vear of course. Also since there were no tyre marks on the road Brazdil apparently didn’t hit the brakes hard in order to avoid an impact of any kind. At the time these factors led some to say that Brazdil had crashed on purpose in order to commit suicide, presumably due to the financial problems which had landed him in jail. But in reality the crash probably wasn’t actually that unexplainable. Had it happened to an experienced Grand Prix driver then the lack of an obvious cause would indeed have been a puzzle. But Brazdil was far from one and was probably badly out of his depth. What is worth noting is the location of the crash, which was in the section between Zebetin and Ostrovacice. This is roughly half way around the lap which means that Bradzil had successfully negotiated around 15 km (9 miles) before disaster hit. Maybe Brazdil started off very carefully but by the half way point of the lap he’d started to gain confidence. Perhaps at that point he started to speed up and his lack of experience had caused him to lose control of the Maserati in a way that would never have happened to a more experienced driver. Conceivably he might have run too close to the side of the road, suffered wheelspin on loose stones and not been able to react before this caused to him to vear further off into the ditch. In truth a driver without the experience to properly handle a car as fast and powerful as the Maserati could have gotten himself into trouble in lots of different ways. On a dangerous circuit like Brno disaster was very likely in those circumstances. Whatever happened Brazdil’s Grand Prix career was very short, tragic and so weird it could never happen today. He remains one of the more bizarre figures in the sports history.
Some unusual things. 