GEORGE MEIER: THE TRANSVERSE TERROR
"Schorsch' Still Bubbly as Ever, Recalls His Great Racing Days With BMW
JERRY SLONIGER
MENTION "Schorsch Meier" around any motorcycle crowd and the automatic response comes rolling back in chorus: Remember ’39 when he was the first foreigner to win the sacred Senior TT for BMW!
In point of fact, this Bavarian legend won a good many other motorcycle grands prix, Six-Day golds and 1200mile trials as well. Not to mention at least one four-wheel title.
From 1933 to 1953 he did very little else but win (or run an Army motor pool). Yet even he considers the Isle of Man his finest single hour.
The statue of Hermes on a winged bike wheel, the Nobel Prize of motorcycling, was first contested before Georg Meier was even born. Through three decades it never rested in a nonGB trophy case. Oh, a foreign bike might steal the Senior one day, but only when ridden by some sturdy Englishman—with occasional help from Scotland and Ireland, of course.
Then Georg-or “Schorsch” if your German runs to a Bavarian accent— arrived with a supercharged BMW and his special knack for learning new tracks quickly. “Boys these days grow up with
automobiles,” Meier comments. “With us it was motorcycles. I was a mechanic by trade, so it was clear I’d be interested in motorcycles.
“Don’t forget that motorization around us was only getting into its stride in the twenties. Bikes and cars were new in Germany and I grew up with them.”
Meier first visited the Isle in 1938 with the intention of racing. Stripped plug threads ended that effort. “Which was probably good luck. This TT course is very difficult and I didn’t know it as well as I might. But I wanted to win -I had the heart. If I’d gotten a signal of say ‘minus 20’ I would probably have taken a chance. And left the road.”
By 1939 he had all the bike titles a man might want. So Meier spent 14 days studying the mountain course—and wondering why spectators grinned. A teammate had stuck an “L” (for Learner) on his leathers.
On race day Schorsch pulled out 22 seconds on Jock West and his sister BMW by Ramsey, led West and the Woods’ Velocette by 52 seconds at the end of Lap 1, and was ahead by twice that after two rounds. Refueling in near-record time, he “took it a little easy” and won going away. “Easy” enough to set a near-90 mph record.
Effortless though this victory looked, it was anything but carefree. No. 49 hadn’t wanted to start at all after teammate Gall died of training injuries, but his German bosses said, “You will win.” So the cast-iron man rode to BMW’s most famous motorcycle success.
Three riders originally wore the title of Gusseisenen or cast-iron men. It went back to the mid-’30s when Meier, Linhardt and Forstner, in their steel soldier helmets, conquered hill and dale for the Bavarian state police and later the German army.
This husky trio won every long distance trial in sight, with Meier emerging as the quickest cop on the quickest team. The name of “cast iron” soon applied to him alone. Georg was equally glued to the BMW emblem—for the logical reason that he never competed on any other brand.
Well, almost never. “Just once I rode a DKW. In 1933 after winning the 2000-Kilometer Trial. Auto Union said, ‘This guy can ride’ and they gave me a works DKW for one event until the clutch cable broke. It was a two-stroke anyway and my love was always the BMW. I stayed with them.”
There was yet another occasion when Meier drew considerable attention on a brand not bearing the quartered blue and white circle. Schorsch made his two-wheel debut at a ripe 13 on his father’s bike and quickly became well known to police around Muhldorf, a village on the Inn River some 50 miles outside Munich.
The year was 1923, coincidentally the same season BMW picked to introduce a small sensation at the Paris Auto Salon-an opposed Twin with shaft drive.
The slender but whipcord-tough Meier and bulky BMW proved made for one another. Not only did Georg never race another brand, he never even competed on any BMW but their flat Twin, despite its squirrely gyroscopic habits.
“It’s the finest bike there is, the most beautiful, but it was difficult to race,” Schorsch admits now from his teak office atop a BMW bike and car emporium.
Outlining its tricky postures, Georg says in his best Bavarian brogue, “In a right-hand curve you had this feeling it dove right in. Wonderful. But when you changed from right to left, that meant throwing the motorcycle over physically. And it still didn’t like to lie there steady. Inline engines were much easier.”
Zeller (Meier’s successor as BMW ace) was another with the cross-piston talent. “But he was a bull. It didn’t bother Zeller if it refused to lie properly. Geoff Duke rode a year for BMW and had only one win. He told me it was just too hard to ride fast. Jock West never reached his best on a BMW either. I suppose I just never rode anything else.”
Georg founded his loyalty early. Even though “the family thought I was crazy,” he spent more police time winning medals in the likes of an East Prussian Winter Trial than escorting army tanks about the Alps. “It isn’t necessary to start with cross-country bikes, but it can’t hurt.”
Such obvious talent for orientation and instant repairs-like 50 miles with a folded handkerchief filling in for an inch of missing tire-carried him onto the 1937 German Six-Days team in Wales. There he rode off and left the lot in final circuit tests, as he recalls now. German headlines proclaimed the 27year-old sergeant a natural racer, so BMW offered a track test.
Schorsch wasn’t all that sure he wanted to leave the knobby tire ranks. “I’m no racer,” he told them, after thrashing his hardest only to lag 6-8 mph behind racing aces. The team boss advised relaxation and Meier moved up to fourth best practice time.
In storybook terms this tale should conclude with success in his maiden effort. In truth Georg didn’t even start. It was suddenly discovered that he had no competition license. Meier pushed off his first race grid on Hockenheim at the end of 1937 instead (with special dispensation) and came home 4th.
He never looked back; he signed a works contract for 1938 and took the laurel wreath seven times in eight starts, barring the TT of course.
Following their Isle of Man stint, BMW went straight to the very slick Spa race, accompanied by grinning English racers. Meier beat them easily. “That gave me confidence.”
GEORGE MEIER:
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He’d already topped BMW’s ’37 champion Gall twice in German runs and went on to sweep both the Teutonic title for big bikes and the 1938 European Championship—in his first round track season.
Georg was all set to be European king again in 1939 but war, auto racing and a crash shortened the season, while Meier led the standings.
He had been called to the car racing world for a test in the vicious Auto Union GP machines following Rosemeyer’s death. Admitting that the tailhappy 600-hp brutes scared him a little, at Nurburgring Georg still passed his rookie test. “In every corner I had a feeling you should reach out and shove the tail back when it tried to overtake you.”
But he shone on rapid tracks, as he had in bike racing. “I always liked the fast courses best, and the fast corners on those circuits.” After timing Meier through a Spa sweeper where even strong men lifted off, Feuereisen of AU told him to concentrate on cars and he’d be a champion there, too.
The choice wasn’t entirely his. “BMW had no racers after Gall crashed, so Ed drive GP cars one Sunday, motorcycles the next.” He took wreaths in Holland and Belgium for BMW that year, on top of his TT victory.
In cars he came close to a victory in his second AU outing at Rheims, a very fast track. His challenge was cut short by a fuel stop that turned into an inferno and left burn scars which you can still see on his back and arm.
That didn’t prevent the iron man’s climbing back into an Auto Union to drive another two hours and finish “only” 2nd. Nor from racing for BMW a week later. Schorsch denies he was “a bull” in strength but is proud of his enduring resiliency.
It wasn’t quite enough in August of ’39 when Meier’s prewar racing came to a sudden end. He crashed heavily while leading the Swedish motorcycle event and went into the hospital with a broken vertebra.
“The luckiest thing that ever happened to me. At 28? Ed have gone to Russia for sure and never come back.” There was even talk of flight training, though Schorsch today speaks like a man who isn’t convinced those things could or should ever leave the ground.
Instead the ex-policeman was posted to Paris where he ran a motor pool, drove the likes of Canaris around town and resisted all promotions to the hinterlands.
After the war he landed in another quasi-military position as combination fire chief, provost and general factotum for an American unit outside Munich. When Germany’s first tentative postwar racing surfaced in 1947, Meier had his own bilingual cheering section.
“I had kept my racing bike under a hay stack near Munich all through the war. About 1946 some English officers arrived and wanted to take away all the ‘secret’ motorcycles which had stolen their TT trophies. But the Americans helped me hide mine better until they left.”
With pickup racing on the agenda again, these same colonels and corporals lent Meier a truck to carry his racer and all the volunteers he needed for a pit crew.
These were the mid-’40s when races carried titles like Hamburg City Park Race, Run Around the Meadow in Munich, or Braunschweig Autobahn Cup—venues and classics fully forgotten a year later. “But it was a beginning.”
For Meier it was a start toward five more German titles, not counting that four-wheel crown among race cars captured for Veritas in 1948 (but it did have a BMW engine).
There were no factory bikes then, “until NSU built the supercharged Three for Herz” and fuel came off the black market for his 50:50 benzol/gas needs. Tires were scarce too. Only prewar stock was left from the days when BMW raced on Metzler, rain or shine. “When we thought it might be wet we cut the treads with a little saw.”
After the war there were only normal tires. “I remember Grenzland Ring in 1949.” (Meier has almost total recall of places and lap times.) “The average then was about 134 mph. During training something hit me in the small of the back like a club.
“Easing off the throttle very gently, I thought this over. I wasn’t wearing suspenders to catch in the wheel. What else? Stopping at the pits they told me the bike was running on fabric; an entire tread had come off my new tire at 150 or so. So we raced on prewar rubber again.”
Schorsch ran anywhere and any time, winning the German title regularly from 1947 through ’50. He was also the man to be clocked at less than 9 minutes at the Freiburg Hillclimb, a serpentine course of 170-odd bends climbing 1500 feet in the sky.
His 1950 title, however, came in a separate supercharged class while a new
man named Zeller took all the unblown half-liter cups. At 40, Meier saw the handwriting. BMW bike production had doubled, they were about to introduces first postwar car and Georg founded his combined dealership in Munich. He started a family too—that charming spectator from Hockenheim had waved back the following lap.
Walter Zeller was German champion in ’51, though Meier still won on Nurburgring, Avus and Schotten, all rider courses, the last two particularly fast and treacherous.
“But where isn’t it dangerous? Take Schotten Ring. One tree after another. We had a man dead at least once every race. I won six times there, but sometimes it took a lot of heart.”
Georg Meier always figured bikes were more dangerous than race cars. “Opinions differ, but—well, let’s say it’s a little wet and whoops . . . your rear wheel is gone and there’s nothing wrapped around you like a car co*ckpit.” Rating a motorcycle racer’s qualities, Schorsch always begins with hand on heart. Answering directly he’ll say, “I suppose natural talent comes first. Then it’s heart, or loving to race.
“I noticed one thing though. Riders who got to the top were the ones who studied. I always walked a new track, even most of the TT. It wasn’t to find an ideal line, just to be sure I had it 100 percent in my head.”
His son has no inclination to follow in his tire tracks, though a daughter of 19 would love to try. “The boy says he wants to die in bed. Our daughter has talent but a girl should do other things. If my boy had the knack I’d have nothing against his racing. I’d be pleased, but he wants to study law.
“If he did race I’d tell him to enter every single scramble or local crosscountry run first. Just plain sit on a motorcycle as often as possible.”
Taking his own advice, Georg spends four-week vacations on a motorcycle. “I always rode the big bikes. Sitting on a lightweight I have this feeling something is missing. A good 3 50 maybe-not too heavy but power.” For himself? “Just sold my 600 and got one of the new 750s.”
Actually Georg wasn’t the only Meier with bike racing talent. “My brother is 18 years younger and a good engineer as well as racer. He built his own bike in 1949 with rear suspension. He called it a Mustang and won just about everything in the national class his first year. Shortly afterward a bad crash damaged his thigh and he was out of racing for two or three years, so he quit.
“The Mustang engine was a BMW 500 he rebuilt from an old army 750.
Alloy cylinders and all that, but the swinging arm frame was his own. BMW produced something like it right afterwards.”
His title string seemed finally knotted after that 1950 title but Meier had some tricks left. Schorsch, his brother and Zeller consummated the Meier career in 1954 by setting a batch of records at Montlhery—well after pundits had written off Georg Meier at age 44.
There was a Monte Carlo rally with a BMW sedan Six in ’54, but he didn’t like it. Mountain tests then were run to a predetermined average for one thing. “I always figured the man who gets up a hill fastest should win.”
Win as Schorsch Meier had when he took one last German motorcycle championship in 1953. Then the earthy Bavarian non-beer drinker (“We export that to America. I drink maybe a bottle a day.”) turned full time to his burgeoning twoand four-wheel showrooms kitty-corner from Munich’s major brewery.
“Right from the beginning we sold the most BMW bikes of all. So many kids said the bikes you buy from old Schorsch must be faster.” (This with a hearty laugh.)
Always happy to ignore paperwork for memory, Meier keeps a rhetorical “Did you know...?” on tap to introduce every story.
“Do you remember that 1938 race against Serafini’s Güera? The Italians were always my chief competitors. They were at least 10 mph faster with 65 hp. We only had 52, revving to 8000. But the power came on through our blower at 4000, though you only had four gears. Still ours didn’t turn on with a thump like some supercharged motorcycles.
“Anyway, Serafini was lots faster. In Sweden he went by like I was strolling. I couldn’t even tuck into his draft.
“But the one I remember best was Hohenstein in ’38. It was a fast course which suited me so I didn’t want to give away my training speed. In order to fool him I sent my own timer to the far side of the track and rode alternate fast/slow laps past him. Official timers could only clock half laps, slow or fast. That evening the papers said Serafini was fastest at 5:10, Meier only managed 5:11. But actually I had clocked 5:06. The night before that race I slept quite well.”
Cast-iron Schorsch Meier freely admits he usually fretted half the night before a race. “If a man says he was never thinking or scared, it’s nonsense. Until the moment that flag falls and you are racing. Then nothing matters.”
Chuckling over the glory days—“This car selling business is no fun”-Meier offered to autograph a BMW book for me. Then he took it back to add a current date. “So people will know Schorsch is still alive.”
Five seconds after meeting this flatout Bavarian that fact had been pretty obvious. [öl
