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.

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.

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.

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.

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...