Richard Trenkel

Richard Trenkel (* 1909 in Warnstedt near Thale in the Harz Mountains ; † July 5, 1964 in Goslar ) was a German entrepreneur and automobile racing driver.

Life

Richard Trenkel ran a mineral oil wholesaler in Bündheim near Bad Harzburg and also owned several petrol stations. In his spare time he was a racing driver and one of the most successful private drivers. In 1953 he won the German sports car championship in the class up to 1100 cm³ with a Glöckler Porsche . This car was a one-off that Trenkel had commissioned from Walter Glöckler in Frankfurt, a roadster with an alcohol-based engine producing 67 hp. From 1948 to 1964 he took part almost exclusively in around 150 circuit races, hill climbs and rallies in a Porsche.

Athletic career as a racing car driver

At the beginning of his career after the Second World War , Trenkel initially drove a Fiat sports car race in the class up to 1100 cm³, which was popular at the time. In 1949 he bought Kurt Kuhnke (1910–1969) from Braunschweig, his VLK (full streamlined lightweight construction). This car with a VW engine was a racing coupé that Trenkel had converted into an open racing sports car. This made him third at the Solitude in 1950 , second at the Grenzlandring , and in the 1951 season he was second in the Eifel race at the Nürburgring and winner of the Braunschweig Prinzenpark race . He drove the seven laps or 159.670 km on the Nürburgring - Nordschleife in 1: 39: 48.6 hours; Average speed 96 km / h.

In 1952 Richard Trenkel was looked after by Glöckler, bought one of the then new 1100 Porsche engines and won the Leipzig city park race , the Sachsenring and came second on the Avus . With the Glöckler Porsche No. 5 built for him, he was the most successful driver of the 1100 cc sports car class in 1953. He won the Eifel race, won the AVUS and the sports car race as part of the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, in Halle and in Leipzig. And despite an accident at the Freiburg-Schauinsland Mountain Prize , he won the championship with great ease . For the first 1000 km race at the Nürburgring in 1953 , he had a 1.5-liter engine installed in his Glöckler-Porsche, which can be seen as the forerunner of the Porsche 550 , and, together with his co-driver Walter Schlueter , got a Lap fourth in the overall standings. 54 cars started this race, 27 finished. The team completed the 43 laps in 8:53:52 hours with an average of 110.2 km / h.

In 1954 the 1100 class no longer existed and Trenkel switched with his Glöckler-Porsche to the internationally fiercely competitive 1500 class, in which the works cars from Porsche and Borgward also competed. The end of this season was tragic. Trenkel had an accident while racing on the Bernau Loop near Berlin, in which he was uninjured, but three members of the race management died. The cause of the accident was possibly a defect in the steering.

End of career and death

The accident put a great strain on Trenkel. Although he bought one of the new Porsche 550 Spyder in 1955 and started with it in Hockenheim and Halle (both place 4) and at the Eifel race at the Nürburgring, he sold the car in the middle of the season. From then on he only occasionally drove “just for fun”, as he said, with a Porsche Carrera GT race, including the 1000 kilometer race. Otherwise he competed in many rallies such as the Wiesbaden, Bad Homburg, Avus and Hanseat rallies. In addition to motorsport, bobsleigh was a hobby of Trenkel. That was obvious; because “on the doorstep”, so to speak, there was a bobsleigh run in Hahnenklee that was used until the 1960s. Trenkel competed in the German Championships in 1953, 1954, 1956 and 1959 with his two-man bobsleigh "Esso".

In July 1964 Richard Trenkel had a fatal accident on the way back from a visit to Salzgitter . On the B 6 between Othfresen and Goslar, a car at the intersection near Kunigunde did not pay attention to the right of way late at night , Trenkel collided with this vehicle and died hours after the accident.

Literature and source

Eckhard Schimpf : Prinzenpark - car and motorcycle races of the post-war period . Delius Klasing Verlag, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-7688-3365-3 , pp. 116-123.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lothar Boschen, Jürgen Barth: The big book of Porsche special types and constructions . Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-87943-805-6 , p. 95.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Behrndt, Jörg-Thomas Födisch, Matthias Behrndt: ADAC Eifelrennen . Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2009, ISBN 978-3-86852-070-5 .
3. ↑ Lothar Boschen, Jürgen Barth: The great book of Porsche types . 2nd edition, Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-613-01284-7 , p. 294.
4. ↑ Michael Behrndt, Jörg-Thomas Födisch, Matthias Behrndt: ADAC 1000 km race . Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2008, ISBN 978-3-89880-903-0 .

Remarks

1. ^ Kurt Kuhnke was a German motorcycle and automobile racing driver from Braunschweig. Together with the VW engineer Walter Hampel and with the support of the Volkswagen factory, which was under British administration at the time, he planned to build a sports coupé based on the VW Type 1 (VW Beetle) in 1945/46. The frame of this car was created in the Heinrich Schwen & Sohn workshop in Wolfsburg, the body was made by Petersen & Sattler. The VLK was first used on August 24, 1947 at the Braunschweig automobile race, which Kurt Kuhnke won. The drag coefficient of the coupé was measured at 0.21. In 1949 Kuhne converted the car into a roadster and sold it to Richard Trenkel.
2. ↑ Trenkel / Schlüter mistakenly mentioned a Porsche 550 as a vehicle in the source. This type was not delivered to private drivers until the end of 1954.