1937 Grand Prix season

The 1937 Grand Prix season was the fifth AIACR European Championship season. The championship was won by Rudolf Caracciola, driving for the Mercedes-Benz team. Caracciola won three of the five events that counted towards the championship, despite not taking part in the first race, the Belgian GP, as he and many other drivers of the German teams and Alfa's Scuderia Ferrari preferred to race in the US a week earlier for the Vanderbilt Cup.

Due to the scoring system which basically added up podium finishes with 1 to 3 points, while covering over 75% of a race distance added 4 points, any absence lowered championships chances significantly as the maximum of 8 points was added.

In 1934, rules were introduced that allowed unlimited engines as long as the car weight was below 750 kg. Starting at around 300hp in 1934, the cars gained power each season. 1937 saw the most powerful Grand Prix cars so far, with the Mercedes-Benz W125 supercharged 5.6L inline-8 engines boasting nearly 650 bhp, and the Auto Union Type C V16 well over 500 hp. Considering that an average saloon car produced around 25 bhp at the time, the performance of these single-seaters was extremely high compared with any other season in modern motorsport; so much so that regulations were put in force for the following year to limit the engine capacity to reduce their power and to add weight to the cars to make them slower.

The development, construction and operation of the German race cars and race tracks was supported by subsidies from the German governments of the time, with Italy and France making similar efforts (Tripoli Grand Prix, S.E.F.A.C., Million Franc Race). The amount of power of the supercharged Mercedes-Benz W125 was not equalled in circuit racing cars until large American V8 engines powered Can–Am cars in the late 1960s, and European Grand Prix cars did not have this kind of power again until the early 1980s 1.5 liter turbocharged engines, a span of nearly 45 years, when Grand Prix racing had long since become Formula One.