Rudolf Uhlenhaut

J WOLFGANG SCHELLER & THOMAS POLLAK, Dalton Watson, £69, ISBN 978 1 85443 282 7

There are easier tasks, we imagine, than writing the biography of a man who ‘consciously stayed in the background’, but J Wolfgang Scheller and Thomas Pollak have done an admirable job of finally dragging the late Rudolf Uhlenhaut out into the spotlight.

Uhlenhaut downplayed his achievements during his lifetime, spouting the ‘team effort’ line often enough that plenty beyond the walls of Mercedes-Benz HQ probably believed it. This book makes the scale of his deception clear: he might not have wanted the public to know it particularly, but Uhlenhaut was an engineer of colossal ability, one of the towering figures in Mercedes history.

He is best known for designing the 300 SL, and the creation of that car is recounted in detail, but the book is more valuable for its exploration of his wider career. Uhlenhaut joined Daimler-Benz in 1931, fresh out of university, and remained with the company until his retirement in 1972. As he rose from talented underling to senior executive, he worked on everything from Grand Prix cars to emissions-reducing technology. Thankfully Scheller and Pollak dedicate more pages to the former than to the latter, and anybody with an interest in 1930s racing will enjoy the chapters on Uhlenhaut’s time as chief engineer in the Racing Department.

A fiercely clever and relentless improver rather than a visionary, Uhlenhaut was well suited to racecar development; he took the disappointing W25 and turned it into the superlative W125 via several big changes and innumerable small ones. His meticulousness is revealed by photographs of his impossibly neat and detailed notebooks, which are still used by Mercedes-Benz Classic technicians when fettling pre-war GP machines.

That some of those cars exist today is due in part to Uhlenhaut’s determination to keep them safe during World War 2. His efforts to hide a pair of W154s from advancing Soviet forces are discussed, along with his bravery in evacuating the families of Daimler-Benz workers from the plant in Nová Paka.

He was extremely private, but his concern for his staff, including the forced labourers sent to DaimlerBenz during the War, tells us much about Uhlenhaut the man. He had a sense of humour, too, noting at the end of his working life: ‘If you want to enjoy your retirement years, you have to sign an advisory contract. Then you can be sure you will never be bothered.’ A good egg as well as a great engineer, written about here with appropriate reverence.