Helmut Polensky

Formula 3 Monopoletta by Helmut Polensky at the Oldtimer Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in 1978

Polensky Monopoletta

Helmut Polensky (born October 10, 1915 in Berlin ; † November 6, 2011 ) was a German racing car driver and designer.

Family and origin

Helmut Polensky was born in Berlin in the middle of the First World War in 1915 as the youngest of four sons of the building contractor Otto Polensky. His grandfather was Gustav Polensky . After finishing school and doing military service, his professional development began in the world of motorcycles and automobiles. After the Second World War he married Ingeborg and lived for the last decades of his life in Feldafing in Bavaria and in Saint-Tropez in the south of France .

The 1930s and World War II

He made his first attempts at racing in the mid-1930s as a motorcycle racer in small club races. In 1939 he competed in several sports car races with a used BMW 328 . In the same year he began engineering training at Auto Union and joined the National Socialist Motor Corps . He spent the war as a military logistician in Berlin, where he managed to flee from Soviet captivity to Hamburg in 1945 . There he worked in 1946 as managing director of a small engine company.

Racing driver and designer

In 1947 he returned to Berlin and opened one of the first Vespa dealerships in Germany in what would later be destroyed in West Berlin . He also started again with motorsport and designed Formula 3 racing cars with 500 cm³ motorcycle engines in his workshop . He called the first car the Kurpfalz, the second was the Monopoletta . This monoposto had a BMW engine. He drove these vehicles in races in West Germany in the late 1940s . In 1950 he was fifth overall in the West German Formula 3 championship.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he increasingly began to drive sports car races, competed in the 1952 Mille Miglia and competed in the Tour de France for automobiles several times with his wife as a passenger . At that time he moved with his family to Karlsruhe and opened a Volkswagen agency there. With Porsche racing cars , he won the Coupe des Alpes in 1953 and the overall ranking of the first European rally championship in the same year . In 1954 he finished eighth overall in the Reims 12-hour race . In 1954, as in 1952, Polensky was first in the overall classification of the Liège – Rome – Liège long-distance journey in a Porsche light-metal coupé with a Fuhrmann engine . Together with his co-pilot Herbert Linge , he won this competition over 5156 km in 94 hours ahead of the team Olivier Gendebien / Charles Fraikin in a Lancia 2500.

He competed three times in the Le Mans 24-hour race. In 1955 , he and Richard von Frankenberg finished fourth in the overall standings in a Porsche 550 , won the racing class for sports cars up to 1.5-liter displacement and won the Index of Performance and secured the 21st Biennial Cup.

He was awarded the Silver Laurel Leaf on March 19, 1953 for his athletic achievements.

1956 resigned from racing and became a successful automobile dealer.

statistics

Le Mans results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
1954	Porsche KG	Porsche 550/4 RS 1500 Coupé	Hans Herrmann	failure	Engine failure
1955	Porsche KG	Porsche 550/4 RS 1500 Spyder	Richard von Frankenberg	4th place and class win
1956	Gonzague Olivier	Porsche 550/4 Spyder	Claude Storez	failure	Ignition distributor

Individual results in the sports car world championship

season	team	race car	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th
1953	Porsche	Porsche 356	SEB	MIM	LEM	SPA	ONLY	RTT	CAP
				64
1954	Porsche	Porsche 550	BUA	SEB	MIM	LEM	RTT	CAP
						DNF
1955	Porsche	Porsche 550	BUA	SEB	MIM	LEM	RTT	TAR
						4th

literature

• Christian Moity, Jean-Marc Teissèdre, Alain Bienvenu: 24 heures du Mans, 1923–1992. Éditions d'Art, Besançon 1992, ISBN 2-909-413-06-3 .

Web links

Commons : Helmut Polensky  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• To the biography of Helmut Polensky (English)
• Race results

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 1954 Reims 12-hour race
2. ↑ International motorsport . ADAC yearbook, December 1954, p. 222 and 233.
3. ↑ Sports report of the Federal Government of September 29, 1973 to the Federal Parliament - printed matter 7/1040 - page 67