Status and Speed

I suspect that no one man in the world has owned and driven as many individual models of one make of motorcar as has Mr. Edward Mayer of London. Mr. Mayer has owned something over one hundred and twenty automobiles of one make: Mercedes-Benz. I think Mr. Mayer's niche in the listings of such curiosa must be secure. The Nizam of Hyderabad, when his holdings of two-and-a-half billion dollars made him very possibly the richest man in the world, owned more than fifty Rolls-Royce automobiles, but he owned them all at one time, and he did not often drive them. Mr. Mayer has owned his cars seriatim, and has driven all of them, and vigorously. There have been men who've owned twenty Bugattis, thirty-one Packards, twenty-six Stutzes, a double gross of steamers, a scuderia of fifteen Bentleys, and so on, but only Mercedes and Mercedes-Benz cars have, to my limited knowledge, gone over the hundred mark in the hands of one man. Since Mercedes cars have always been expensive, Mr. Mayer obviously had the means to buy one hundred and twenty of any make. One may wonder why he chose the make he did.

To drive a Mercedes-Benz 300SL is to find part of the answer. When this car appeared in 1952 it stunned discerning motorists all over the world, for it was obvious that the 300SL, fully developed, would be as fast as some racing cars and as comfortable as most de luxe sedans. So it has turned out: the present-day 300SL roadster is available with a gearing that will produce 165 miles an hour; a combination of fairly soft suspension and fat, form-fitted leather seats makes it remarkably comfortable; and since the oversteer tendency of the early models has been corrected, the 300SL is a smooth and simple car to handle in the ordinary speed ranges. Naturally it has had a profound effect on design all over the world. The Chevrolet Corvette, for example, a really remarkable automobile in its own right, found much that was exemplary in the 300SL.

One of the reasons for the enduring fascination of Mercedes and Mercedes-Benz automobiles has been the tendency of the company to produce automobiles to this Germanic conception: technically advanced, strongly built, comfortable in a settled, foursquare fashion, and, if possible, in some way better than anything else in the world.

Another has been the pedigree of the firm, now Daimler-Benz Aktiengesellschaft. It runs back to Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, who, if they did not invent the automobile, certainly did develop it and did put it into practical production. The first series-produced car in the world was a Benz "Velo" of 1893.

Great names, great men, have much to do with the Drang toward Mercedes-Benz. An intriguing number of individuals legendary in the wonderful world of the automobile have had to do with Daimler-Benz: aside from Gottlieb and Paul Daimler and Karl Benz and Eugen and Richard Benz, there were Ferdinand Porsche, August Horch, Wilhelm May-bach, Robert Bosch, each a giant. As for race-drivers, the list would have to begin with Camille Jenatzy, end with Stirling Moss, and it would include almost every great pilote who has lived.

Other automobile manufacturers have built fast touring cars, or luxurious cars, or economy cars, or trucks, or racing cars, but not many have built all five, as Daimler-Benz has, and none with such a flair: Daimler-Benz built a truck that would do 106 miles an hour fully (continued on page 74)Status and Speed(continued from page 32) loaded; and a Mercedes-Benz economy car really is economical. It will run nicely on furnace oil at ten cents or so a gallon. (But Uncle Sugar will hit you if you're caught!) A Mercedes-Benz luxury car is massive with glassy-polished wood and thick leather, and there may be four radio speakers in it, one in each corner, front and rear. Mercedes-Benz gran turismo cars have been the peers of anything on the road, from the days of the fabled SS and SSK cars to the present. As for racing cars, brutal is the word.

A Benz-powered automobile won an American race sixty-five years ago, from Chicago to Waukegan and back, running ninety-two miles in nine hours and thirty minutes for a prize of $500, the first of eighty-four American races, Indianapolis included, won between 1895 and 1937; and three Mercedes-Benz 220SE sedans won the 1960 Monte Carlo Rally. In both cases the cars were privately entered, not factory-sponsored, but in the years between these two events the works competition department has repeatedly unleashed virtually unbeatable automobiles on a regular and predictable cycle: development and test, competition, retirement from racing, development and test, and so on. At the moment, the cycle is in the retirement phase, and while the best information available would seem to indicate that no racing is planned for the immediate future, no one quite believes it, and if a Mercedes-Benz gas-turbine racing car were to appear in the next two or three years, few among the cognoscenti would profess surprise. In the infant days of the automobile, racing constituted the best advertising; unlike most other manufacturers, Daimler-Benz executives have never abandoned this principle and only recently modified it. Comparatively small expenditure for conventional advertising has been the rule. They have some reason to think they have been right, since the company is, in proportion to its invested capital, one of the great money-makers in the world. American manufacturers returned to the race-publicity idea a few years ago and found that it worked very well indeed. They abandoned it under fear of legislative interference with the horsepower race, but there are many indications at the moment that they would like to go back.

The essence of appeal in race-publicity advertising was best stated by James Thurber. There is a little Walter Mitty in every man. Driving, say, a Volkswagen or a Jeep down to the drugstore, it is possible to imagine oneself running into Le Thillois corner in the French Grand Prix, flat out in fifth gear in a Ferrari, 180 miles an hour – but it's easier if one's driving a car that can race or is, at least, related to a racing car. And it really doesn't matter whether one has actually raced or not: the non-driver may dream of winning a novice race at Lime Rock, while the competitor may see himself winning the championship of the world, everything technically correct and in glorious Vista-Vision.

To provide the biggest possible clientele with the best possible dream-foundations, Daimler-Benz, many decades ago, appÈied intellection to the then-random sport of motor-racing. The French G.P. of 1914, run that year on Bastille Day, offers a clear example. Historically, the accepted mode had been for a manufacturer to make a team of three or four cars, hire some good drivers, provide mechanics and spare parts in numbers that seemed by rule of thumb to be adequate, and hope for the best. This was the way it was done by "practical, hard-headed" men. The Germans, correctly concluding that the practical, hard-headed men of the world have nearly always succeeded in lousing up everything they've touched, from government to gumdrops, elected to apply Prussian precision to the problem.

Some three months before July 14, a crew of Germans appeared at the circuit near Lyons. There were seven drivers, seven cars, a squad of mechanics and a manager. The manager was the one carrying the whistle. Promptly at five every morning the whistle sounded. The drivers proceeded to their cars by the numbers. The cars were ready because the whistle had been blown earlier for the mechanics. The cars dispersed, in no haphazard fashion, to various points on the twenty-three-mile course where, for the next six hours, they attacked assigned problems: maximum speed in such-and-such a straightaway, shift point in this approach, cutoff and braking point in another, optimum speed in that bend, und so weiter. At eleven o'clock the whistle blew again and everybody formed on the hotel dining room. At two o'clock, out again, until seven in the evening. Everything was noted, evaluated, put on paper, reduced to formulate. After a few weeks of this, the party left. In a month it was back again, for more practice, but with different cars. They were shorter, they had different gear-ratios, and other, unspecified things had been done to them. On the eve of the race, one of the French manufacturers, Louis Delage, said that he considered the odds against the Germans to be about twenty-five to one. It would have been a good bet: the Mercedes cars came in first, second and third.

The founders of the line, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, were not much enamored of racing, which is hardly surprising. When they began to be con- (continued on page 78)Status and Speed(continued from page 74) cerned with automobiles, the problem was not how fast they'd go, but rather, if they would go at all. To achieve six city blocks without a breakdown was an occasion that called for sending some-body to the cellar for a bottle of the good stuff. After all, Karl Benz had built his first automobile without ever having seen one. A moment's thought is required for appreciation of this fact. It's as if you were to undertake the construction of a bathysphere. The bathysphere might be easier. You may have seen pictures and technical descriptions of bathyspheres, while it's unlikely that Benz had been similarly informed regarding the work of men who had preceded him, Siegfried Marcus' 1877 car, for example. Nevertheless, the 1885 Benz car was so sound in concept that it laid down the pattern that would be followed in many millions of motorcars: it had a water-cooled engine, electrical ignition, and differential on the rear wheels. In the same year, Gottlieb Daimler, working independently, produced his first engine, a one-cylinder model.

Messrs. Daimler and Benz were inventors and manufacturers, but Mercedes was a lady: Mercedes Jellinek. She was the daughter of Emile Jellinek, a wealthy man who was the son of a Hungarian rabbi. Jellinek was Austro-Hungarian consul in Nice in 1900 and, in common with most monied men of the day, an amateur motorist. He was interested in Daimler cars, then being built at Cannstatt, and he persuaded Wilhelm Maybach, Daimler's chief engineer, later famous for the Maybach engines which powered World War I Zeppelins, to design a fast sporting car. He had already bought and sold thirty-four Daimlers, and if the new one were made he would undertake to buy thirty-six – an enormous order for the day. There were two Èther conditions: he wanted exclusive rights for France, Austro-Hungary, Belgium and America, and he wanted the car named for his daughter, Mercedes. It was done. In point of fact, until 1920, the Mercedes car carried the two accents (Mercédès) used in her name. Jelliuek may have had a practical purpose in asking for the name change: Daimler had a Teutonic ring to French ears, and the War of 1870 was still remembered. He was much devoted to his daughter, so much so that when he raced, he used her name as a nomme de course, and later in life he changed his legal surname to Jellinek-Mercedes. Jellinek made a great deal of money out of the Mercedes company, although he was of course no longer concerned with it when the merger with Benz came in 1926.

The car Jellinek brought into being was another monument of an automobile. It revolutionized the concept of the "horseless carriage." It had a pressed-steel frame, a honeycomb radiator, mechanical valves, a variable-speed engine (most previous engines ran at one constant speed) and a "gate" or "H" gearbox instead of the standard "progressive" box in which first could not be reached from fourth without going through third and second. The 1885 Benz car had stated the form of the automobile, and the 1901 Jellinek-May-bach-Daimler car confirmed and refined it. The design features of the car were copied far and wide. It was the best automobile in the world in 1901, the first of what David Scott-Moncrieff, a Briton who is a world authority on the make, has called four Mercedes "world-beaters," the other three being the chain-driven 90-horsepower cars, the SSK and the 300SL.

The 90-horsepower car was introduced in 1913 and the chassis price was $5750 in Europe. It ran a big, slow-turning engine (1350 revolutions per minute at 85 mph). It was chain-driven. The 90-horsepower car set new standards for acceleration, ease of handling and longevity, and it remained until the beginning of the First World War one of the most desirable motorcars on the market. It had been designed to accept any kind of body, and in consequence was seen in every form, from open two-seater to limousine.

The Daimler and Benz and Mercedes cars of the pre-Kaiser War era were splendid motor-carriages, no doubt, and to have seen them running wild in races along the rutted pikes of the day, their thick-necked, ox-legged drivers fighting the brutal steering gear, navigating through the dust clouds by watching the treetops bordering the road, must have made a sight to stir the soul. (Sometimes, to be sure, the trees ran straight when the road curved, but this was held to be a normal hazard.) "Their drivers were swashbucklers who now and then refreshed themselves by upending a pint of red champagne during a pit stop without fear that some busybody would turn them in for it, and they built personal attachments for their cars that are rare today. The great Camille Jenatzy, a hawk-beaked, red-headed wild man, insisted that he would die in a Mercedes, and maintained it even after he'd retired from racing. He came to his end as the result of a hunting accident. In extremis, he was rushed to a hospital by automobile, but expired en route. The car, sure enough, was a Mercedes.

These Edwardian giants are so remote from us in time, however, that few can remember them, and the tangible legend of the Mercedes-Benz really begins in the late 1920s with the coming of the SS and SSK models. Really one must approach the legends of the S cars with careful coldness, because hysteria is contagious, and hysteria is not too strong a word to use in assaying the values placed on them by owners and authorities both at the time they were built and currently.

To go into the intricacies of pedigree complicated by German nomenclature would result in everyone's falling off the sled here in the first turn, so we'll say only that the SS (Super Sport) was called the 38/250 SS and was preceded by the 33/180 K and the 36/220 S. The SS made the scene first in the Irish Tourist Trophy race of 1929 and was shown at the Motor Show in London the same year. Driven in the T.T. by Rudolf Caracciola, the greatest Mercedes-Benz team-driver of his time, the car beat three of the best British contemporaries, 4-1/2-liter supercharged Bentleys. With four-passenger open bodywork the car was about 16 feet in length overall and it would do about 115 miles an hour. The six-cylinder engine was big – 7 liters, or 420 cubic inches – and was equipped with a supercharger. This supercharger, which also appeared on the 36/220 S cars, was the foundation of many weird and wonderful Mercedes-Benz legends. It was a Roots-type, named for a couple of Cornersville, Indiana, boys who invented it in 1866 as a pump, and it ran only on demand. Most superchargers, or blowers, are permanently geared to the engine they serve. The Mercedes type was not. It came in only when the accelerator pedal was pushed through a stop. For technical reasons it had then to blow through the carburetor, rather than suck from it, and the din of the air-column blasting through the carburetor's inner mysteries was startling and siren-like. People who've never driven a blown Mercedes are likely to rant on about the explosive acceleration it produced, its appalling-effect on the fellow you were passing, and so on. It was not all that violent, and a well-driven SS would go from 0 to 60 mph in about eighteen seconds, fast for its day, to be sure, but a 220SE Mercedes-Benz of 1960, a touring car pure and simple, will do it in 12.2. The SS blower was a "sprint" type, which meant that it was to be used for from ten to twenty seconds at a time only, and not while running fast, and only with a fifty-fifty mixture of gasoline and benzol in the tank.

The S cars were lean and mean-looking. They were long and narrow. On many models the distance from radiator to windshield equaled that from windshield to spare tire. To a degree that perhaps no other motorcar ever has, they exuded virility. They handled very well indeed, despite their awesome length. The driver was placed well aft, where (continued on page 85)Status and Speed(continued from page 78) he could receive early warning of incipient skid. The SS models steered nicely but the brakes were chancy. Like the 300SL in its day, the SS stunned even knowledgeable beholders. After having driven one for the first time, in 1929, the editor of the British periodical Motor Sport was moved to say, "Words fail me – this is the most amazing motorcar it has ever been my fortune to drive." Some current authorities take a more balanced view, arguing that razor-sharp factory tuning was needed to get superlative performance from an SS, and that legend grew about the car mostly because it was scarce and expensive. (Only one hundred and fourteen SS cars were built and forty survive.)

The SSK was an even rarer beast, only thirty-three built, of which fourteen still live: ten in the United States, three in Britain, one in South America. The SSK was so called for the word kurz or short. The wheel base was 1 foot, 5-3/4 inches shorter than the SS', or 9 feet, 8-1/8 inches. It was lighter in chassis, more powerful in engine: 225 horsepower with the blower going. It handled better, particularly in corners, and would do 120 miles an hour in an era when an ordinary, off-the-peg store-bought car that would run 75 was a hot number indeed.

The S cars reached their pinnacle in the SSKL, which was a Super-Sport-Kurz Leicht, or light. To achieve this lightness, the designer, Hans Nibel, had provided for, among other things, the drilling of many holes in the chassis. Every hole had of course been shrewdly calculated, but even so, a broadside view of an SSKL was enough to give the neophyte driver pause: saucer-sized perforations ran the length of the exposed side-rails, and indeed everything that was big enough to accept a drill seemed to have known one. The car had a fussy, high-compression engine and the biggest of the three catalogued superchargers, delÈvering air compressed to 12 pounds to the square inch. This blower was known in England as the "elephant blower" in deference to its size, and the term became one of the great clichés of the day. People who didn't know a supercharger from a lemon-squeezer would knowingly refer to any sports M-B as having "the elephant blower, you know, old boy."

The SSKL produced 300 horsepower with the elephant puffing, certainly a startling figure for a production sports car. To evaluate the car by U.S. standards, it must be compared with a 1960 Chrysler 300F, which can be had with 400 horsepower. A 300F will certainly do 140 miles an hour and no doubt would equal the 147 which was the noted top speed of an SSKL running with a standard body. Similarly shrouded, a 300F Chrysler would probably do the 156 reached by a streamlined SSKL, but the SSKL did it twenty-nine years ago, in 1931. The really astonishing fact in the SSKL's career was its success when run against full Grand Prix racing cars. It won the Hill Climb championship of Europe in 1931 and the Mille Miglia of the same year. Fewer than ten SSKLs were built, and Scott-Moncrieff knows of the existence of only one, in a museum in Dresden.

The S cars were available until 1934, and in 1933 the company's sports-car program was overlapped with the introduction of a softer fast touring car, the 500K (500 for 5 liters of engine, K for Kompressor, or supercharger). The 500K was not as well known or as much admired as its successor, the 540K of 1937. The 540K was lusted after by many as the last decade of peace between the wars ran out, and it is lusted after by many today. A 540K is a big automobile, its wheel base nearly 11 feet, its weight nearly three tons. Driving all this mass is an eight-cylinder supercharged engine of 5.4 liters. A 540K in perfect tune will do 106 miles an hour with the blower going. It has independent suspension on all four wheels, is marvelously comfortable, steers heavily and has a slow, irritating gearbox. It usually carries low and heavy but somehow lithe-looking coach-work, chromed outside exhaust pipes. New, it was a $14,000 motorcar and it looked it. A 580K, designed to do 140 miles an hour, was cut off by World War II, but an even bigger model, the 770K Grosserz Mercedes, was made in small number. Grosser was the word for the 770Ks: they were huge, nearly 20 feet long. A 770K was the carriage of choice for top-ranking Nazi nabobs, and some had them armor-plated. Goering had a convertible and Hitler's tourer featured a little platform under the front seat on which he could stand to peer out at the heiling throngs.

But these cars were toys, compared with the racing models of the 1930s, the lithe, big-wheeled W25s and W125s. Laurence Pomeroy, the most eminent authority writing on the subject in the English language today, has stated his considered belief that with the W125 the piston engine reached a peak of development it will probably never come to again. The W125 eight-cylinder engine of 5.6 liters (a shade bigger than the Rambler V-8's) developed 646 horse-power. The car weighed less than an ordinary two-seater sports car and would do 200 miles an hour. The level of skill required to use this fantastic power on a two-lane road-racing circuit was so high (the engine would spin the rear wheels on dry concrete at 150 miles an hour in top gear!) that there were never at any one time as many as a dozen men in the world who could achieve it, and only one, Caracciola, could be said to have wholly mastered the car. The W125 was succeeded by the twelve-cylinder W163, a very slightly slower 468-horse-power car better adapted to twisty circuits, and these two automobiles, together with the German Auto-Union cars, completely dominated pre-World War II racing. That was in fact their purpose: both firms were partially subsidized by the German government in recognition of the potential propaganda value of their performance against French, British and Italian competitors.

The Daimler-Benz factories were virtually laid flat on the ground by World War II bombing, but many of the firm's most talented employees survived, and production was soon put in train. Small passenger cars were produced (Mercedes-Benz had made small rear-engined cars and small diesels in the 1930s). Rudolf Uhlenhaut, in charge of research and development of racing cars, and Alfred Neubauer, in charge of racing proper, ran three W163 cars in the Argentine Grand Prix of 1951. They finished second and third. Mercedes-Benz passenger cars began to run in rallies. The 300SL appeared in 1952 and ran second and fourth in the Mille Miglia. Three were entered at Le Mans in that year. With the twenty-four-hour race almost over they were running second and third to Pierre Levegh's Talbot, but Levegh, who had insisted on driving the entire stretch unrelieved, was groggy with fatigue and made an error in judgment that blew up his overstressed engine. The 300SLs, running steadily and conservatively, took the first two places. They won the Mexican Road Race that year, too. In 1954 a new Grand Prix car was unveiled, the W196. It developed 300 horsepower and weighed only 1540 pounds, or considerably less than an MG. It won first and second places in the 1954 French Grand Prix, its first appearance.

In 1955 Mercedes-Benz won literally everything: the Grand Prix championship, the sports-car championship, the touring-car championship. Juan Manuel Fangio, to retire five times champion of the world, was now driving for Mercedes-Benz, and so was Stirling Moss, the second Englishman in history to have a place on the team (Richard's Seaman was the first, in the 1930s). It was in 1955 that Pierre Levegh, driving a Mercedes at Le Mans, lost control, knifed into the crowd and killed more than eighty people. (He had been given a place on the team primarily as a public relations gesture in recognition of his heroic singlehanded effort of the year before. Nevertheless, he was a thoroughly competent driver.) And it was in 1955 that Stirling Moss, with Denis Jenkinson sitting beside him and reading the road to him off a 17-foot-long strip of paper, won the Mille Miglia in a 300SLR – a 2-1/2-liter G.P. car modified for two passengers and road use. He drove for ten hours, seven minutes and forty-eight seconds over open highway at an average speed of 97.9 mph – which meant that he was doing 170 mph wherever he possibly could, and running 125-150 through towns and cities!

Alfred Neubauer, who hadn't driven a racing car for decades, had an important role in Moss' Mille Miglia victory, as he had in every race Mercedes-Benz had won since the First World War. Neubauer, a corpulent, bearlike man, was obsessed by attention to minutiae. When tire experts were seen taking the temperature of the road surface before a race, they were doing it because Neubauer had asked them to; when Mercedes-Benz drivers and technicians appeared on the Mille Miglia course two months before a race to run thousands of miles in practice in three different models of cars, Neubauer was in charge. He loathed emergency, but when it struck, he was ready, and if a cotter pin was needed, or a spare engine, it was at hand because Neubauer had seen to it. His power was absolute and his orders unquestioned. He controlled the cars rigidly from the pits during a race, moving one up, dropping another back, changing drivers according to an overall strategic scheme. Instant punishment awaited a driver who flagrantly disobeyed him, although one first-line driver of the 1930s, Manfred von Brauchitsch, did occasionally defy him and get away with it – but he was a Prussian and an aristocrat and for all his ferocity Neubauer, who was not of noble stock, couldn't quite get over that hump.

Retired from racing now, like the company itself, Neubauer's reputation is secure: of all those who have followed his peculiarly demanding profession, he was the best. So is Uhlenhaut the best: an engineer who drives so well that he can extend any car, even a W163, to its limit, and thus know, aÈ a man of lesser ability could never hope to know, exactly wherein it might be flawed.

Every sport is to its devotees the sport of kings. If you think curling, essentially the business of sliding granite rocks on an ice rink, is an unexciting endeavor, you haven't talked with many curlers; badminton isn't an old ladies' game to anyone who's ever marveled at the ferocity with which the experts play it. Still, even healthy skepticism must concede that automobile-racing is demanding of man and machine. Mercedes-Benz racing engines were tested by being run flat-out for forty-eight consecutive hours, and a driver like Stirling Moss has vision so acute that he has, while motoring at 160 miles an hour, identified by name another driver so far in the distance that his co-driver couldn't be sure whether he saw an automobile or a horse in the road. The Daimler-Benz Aktiengesellschaft can properly say that it knows more about automobile racing than any other organization in the world, and every Mercedes-Benz driver, whether he's running a 190 diesel, a 220 sedan, a big 300D voiture de grande luxe, a 190SL or 300SL sports car, is really entitled to think that his car has in it at least a few of the steel genes of its ancestors, all the way from Karl Benz' buggy like 1885 car to the rocketing 300SLR which so bemused Denis Jenkinson, when, in the 1955 Mille Miglia, he noticed that he and Moss were briskly passing a low-flying airplane!