The forgotten Mercedes R107 500SL Rally car

by Bernd

in Mercedes SL-Class

Everybody, who is a bit familiar with the Mercedes SL rally activities, knows that Daimler-Benz had used just two street-going SL cars for works-supported races: the 300SL W198 and the 230SL W113. And that was it. Well…was it really? What happened to the Mercedes R107 SL? Yes, it was used as a rally car, but […]

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190SL, the car that saved the SL name

Life for the 190SL did not start easy. Not that it was the black sheep in the family, but it was not the white swan either. It was the smaller brother of a show star that had been sent to a gifted cosmetic surgeon to make it look similar. That beauty was just skin deep […]

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Mercedes 190 fintail

Mercedes 190 Fintail, the workhorse of the 1960s There was nothing fancy about the Mercedes 190 Diesel and its successor the 200 Diesel. Half of them were either black or beige and had taxi signs on their roofs and the other half were owned by farmers, butchers, bakers etc. All of them were grossly misused, […]

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Mercedes 300, driving a classic today

Not many people had the chance to sit inside the Mercedes 300 S and even fewer actually drove this car. Like in the sedan, you sit behind a big steering wheel and look at an array of chromed knobs at the lower left side of your beautiful, solid wooden dashboard. You hold your breath. Everything […]

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Mercedes R 230 SL

The Mercedes R 230 series SL is the fifth generation of the venerable sports car, if one does not count the 190SL (this is what Daimler-Benz does). Most of its predecessors have been presented to the automotive world in the month of March at the Geneva International Automobile Show. This time it is different. It […]

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Early June vintage car outing

Twice a year, my hometown Muenster in North-Western Germany is home to a small, yet very nice gathering of vintage cars. The beauty is, these meetings are not restricted to one particular marque, but everybody with a car built before 1973 can participate. The first such gathering happened last weekend, and we were blessed with […]

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Mercedes-Benz: Better than Gold? Investing in Historic Mercedes Cars

Investing in Classic Cars had its ups and downs over the last thirty years and with very few exceptions, not many collectors took it lightly, when the prices of their proud possessions took a heavy beating in the early 1990s. I never forget the answer of a Ferrari GTO owner, when asked in 1994, what […]

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Mercedes 220SL, the car that never made it

220SL, the alternative to the 190SL in the 1950s? When talking about the 220SL, we have to look first at the Mercedes 190SL, which would most probably have never been built without the input of Max Hoffman. The Austrian born Hoffman was based in New York and imported a variety of mostly British cars to […]

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Mercedes 300 SEL 6.3, the 1960s V8 powerhouse

The initiative to build one of the most exciting executive sedans of the 1960s did not come from Daimler-Benz, it came from a German automotive magazine (auto motor und sport), whose editor Hans-Ulrich Wieselmann lamented that Mercedes-Benz was building great, but not very exciting cars suited for executives, farmers and retirees. Mercedes 300 SEL 6.3, […]

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Mercedes 170, the late 1940s S-Class

   This article does not deal with the Mercedes 170V, built from 1945 till 1953, but the successor, the Mercedes 170 S, built from 1949 till 1955. Mercedes 170s, 1951 It is interesting that a Mercedes 170, once thought to be for the upper middle-class prior to World War II, has developed in Germany into […]

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