An Excellent Book: “Stealing Speed”

How East Germans Changed Grand Prix Motorcycle Racing

Five years after its first printing sold out, used copies of Mat Oxley’s book “Stealing Speed” were selling for as much as $900 in hardcover and $115 in paperback on Internet sites. So Oxley has reprinted the book in hardcover himself and is now selling it direct to the public for about $23 U.S. plus shipping and handling, at www.matoxley.bigcartel.com/product/stealing-speed .

The book is an amazing story from 1961, when the Cold War was at its height and the world was on the brink of Armageddon. At the same time, the East and West were fighting a very different battle on the racetracks of Europe. Powered by two-stroke engine technology developed by former Nazi rocket scientist Walter Kaaden, tiny East German motorcycle factory MZ took on the might of the emerging Japanese motorcycle industry with the most powerful bikes in the world. This is the story of MZ rider Ernst Degner, who defected to the West at the height of his battle for the 1961 World Championship and sold MZ’s winning two-stroke engine secrets to Suzuki, while his wife and children were drugged and smuggled through the newly built Berlin Wall. The following year Suzuki and Degner made history by winning the two-stroke’s first World Championship and Japan was on its way to conquering the world of motorcycling. Branded a traitor by East Germany’s communist authorities, Degner’s life took a downward spiral. He suffered horrific injuries in a fiery racing accident and later died in mysterious circumstances, addicted to morphine.

The big question is, would Honda’s NSR500, Suzuki’s RG500, Yamaha’s RD350 or any other high-performance Japanese two-strokes have existed if it wasn’t for two East Germans employed by MZ, engineer Walter Kaaden and rider Ernst Degner? Maybe not, according to “Stealing Speed.”