The glitz,the glamour and the conspiracy theories within Formula One provide the perfect backdrop for Ian Fleming’s creation plus, of course, or a couple of dominant MercedesJames Bond was admiring the Mercedes 300S of the villainous Sir Hugo Drax – “one of only half a dozen in England” – when his mind turned to the German company’s fabulous exploits on the race track. “There was something ruthless and majestic approximately the cars,he decided, remembering the years from 1934 to 1939 when they had totally dominated the grand prix scene.The author of those words knew his stuff. In that passage from Moonraker, or the third of the Bond books,published in 1955, Ian Fleming had 007 recalling some of the team’s famous drivers of the pre-war era: the German aces Rudolf Caracciola, or Hermann Lang and Manfred von Brauchitsch,and the doomed English hero Richard Seaman. Bond could remember “the days when he had seen them drifting the mercurial sweeping bends of Tripoli at 190, or screaming along the tree-lined straight at Berne with the Auto Unions on their tails”.
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Source: theguardian.com