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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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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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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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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300 SL Mercedes, 300 SL W194 and 300 S tested in a wind tunnel In the so-called good old days, cars were styled by intuition, not by wind tunnels. That way we have great cars such as the 300 SL Mercedes Gullwing, styled by Karl Wilfert or the equally important 300 Adenauer and its sibling […]
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This is the sixth Mercedes SL generation carrying the iconic name, if one does not count the 190SL (which Mercedes does not seem to do). Each generation lasted on average some 11.5 years and each of them has managed to set technical benchmarks for its time, the very first one even in two categories: design […]
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The early 1960 were a prosperous era with many different car models to choose from. Mercedes faced the difficult task to replace both the mighty 300SL and the 190SL with just one single successor. And in order to generate some buzz before the official launch at the Geneva Motor Show on March 14, 1963, management […]
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