Emw, Damw, Awe

[WANHER]

Trouble with East-Germans cars. Those ones are the same, they change
her name in a few years but information on those cars or race on the other side of the iron curtain are very scarce en also pictures are very difficult to obtain.
Help

[Vitesse]

DAMW and EMW are essentially products of the same factory and unfortunately very difficult to tell apart, especially from the fragmentary entry lists that exist for 50s East German races. There is much work still to be done, I think, on trying to sort this out!
That horrid word "Eigenbau" (Special) doesn't help either!!

The Deutsches Amt fur Material und Warenprufung was an official East German body which built racing cars until 1956. Their first car was the DAMW F2 car, BMW 328-powered with a ladder frame chassis: it also had an offset driving position because the same chassis was used for the EMW sports cars. So, the single-seaters look very like a sports car!

The name of the company was changed to EMW in 1952 and after the death of Paul Greifzu the EMW team leader Edgar Barth won the majority of East German events: on occasional forays to the West the EMW didn't really prove competitive apart from Barth's 5th in the very wet 1953 Eifelrennen - that may be more of a tribute to Barth than the car.

DAMW built another F2 car, based on the plans for the E-type Auto Union, but with a 2.0 litre engine rather than its planned 1.5 litre s/c engine. There were apparently lubrication problems with the engine and the project was cancelled. At least two were built and one is now in the Donington Collection, mis-labelled (many think) as an Auto Union E-type ... but that's another story!!

A further F2 car for 1957 was also cancelled and the team of ex-BMW and Auto Union engineers was set to work building Wartburgs!!

As to race results, the Sheldon "black books" have quite a lot, but as with anything pre-reunification, their accuracy and completeness is open to doubt!

Hope this helps!!

EMW, which changed their name to AWE (Auto Werke Eisenach) after 1956, built originally 2-liter sports cars since 1952. This was first an effort financed by the East-German Government for propaganda purposes and was first built in the Eisenacher Motoren Werke (EMW), a former BMW factory in East Germany. The early cars used the 6-cylinder engine from the BMW 328. The pushrod engine had a capacity of 1971 cc, with 66 mm bore and 96 mm stroke, delivering about 80 hp at 4500 rpm. Their sports racing cars had low-slung aluminum bodies but this early model had lots of breakdowns. They also had editions as Formula II cars.

Later models came with a 1.5-liter 6-cylinder twin ohc engine, with 66 mm bore and 72 mm stroke and a 9.5:1 compression, giving over 142 hp at 7000 rpm. These sports racing cars weighted only 540 kg and could reach 240 km/h. Edgar Barth and Arthur Rosenhammer were racing these silver cars successfully against the 550 Porsches during 1955 as far as I can remember. When they stopped production of these cars, end of the fifties, their top driver Edgar Barth 'escaped' to West Germany to drive for Porsche.

Maybe Michael knows if there exists a German book about these cars?

[WANHER]

EMW has also sell cars in fact pure BMW 318 - 328
totally the same car with only one sligthly difference
the front badge was red and not blue

Robert

[fines]

Yes, EMW was established at the site of a BMW production plant at Eisenach. The commies simply made that a "Staatseigener Betrieb" (state-owned company) with the name "Eisenacher Motoren-Werke" as opposed to the "Bayrische Motoren-Werke" in Munich. They continued production of the pre-war BMW line and just changed the BMW-badge from Bavarian white/blue to white/commie-red and replaced the "B" with an "E"!

Unfortunately, I'm slightly uncomfortable with East-German matters, I need to dig deep! Gimme some time!

[Flicker]

Here you can find a funny page...

http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~pantec/emw.html

... about EMW road cars...