ALL THE MERCS · RICCI’S GARAGE · CONCEPT CARS
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“THE MINDERS TURNED A BLIND EYE. I IMMEDIATELY BECAME POWER CRAZED”
If you had to pick any historic Mercedes-Benz from its deep and diverse back catalogue to drive, what would it be? You can run up to anything not in current production, and you can include weirdos and prototypes if you want. A Gullwing would probably be in there somewhere, legend that it is. Probably the 300SL Roadster too, given that they cost millions and make you feel like Frank Sinatra/Grace Kelly (delete as applicable), except with more power than the 190SL they drove in High Society. You’d probably want a go in a 320N Combination Coupé from the late Thirties – an original fast Merc. Or you could be drawn to something with historical significance, like the Benz Patent Motor Car from 1886 – the original ‘horseless carriage’ – just because. That’s right, 1886. When starting your car involved muscling a huge flywheel into action – and nearly breaking your wrist – ‘steering wheels’ weren’t invented (it steers with a tiller), the drivebelts were made of leather and four wheels were science fiction. A slow, unstable lightly dangerous and utterly unique experience. Me? I’m of late Seventies vintage, I go weak at the knees for strange things like 560 SECs, 190E 2.5-16 Evo IIs, CLK DTMs and stupid stuff like the AMG 300 E 6.0-litre from 1986. Y’know, the one that’s just known as ‘The Hammer’. Oh, and I’d chuck in a Unimog, obviously. Because Unimog.
What if someone handed you the keys to all of them, plus a few more, swung open the gates of an enormous secret test facility and told you to knock yourself out? Sounds like a dream, right? Well it wasn’t. Because it happened to me.
First, a bit of background. My mate Michael is part of a team that runs the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, which cares for examples of pretty much all of Mercedes’ past production. A discography littered with greatest hits from every era. Now, Michael and the team had decided to give some of the historic
cars an airing, and were inviting various VIPs to go and drive them. I can only assume that someone dropped out last minute, because I was invited too.
I would say that it was incredible, but that feels like damning the event with faint praise. Even in the privileged world of motoring journalism where fast, exciting cars come along fairly regularly, this was a special few days. The kind of whirlwind where you only start to figure out quite how absurd things were 48 hours post-airlift.
There’s literally too much to go into here in full (updates will be on TopGear.com in the near future), but I started hard. With a Unimog U5023 modified to set a new altitude record for ICE wheeled vehicles (6,694m above sea level). A 5.1-litre four-pot with just 231bhp, 16 gears, a huge lift and tyres the size of a Smart car. It had four winches. Having been shown exactly what it could do by its regular captain – including driving up what to all intents and purposes was a vertical wall, and a mountainside that I would struggle to crawl up – I lied through my teeth about having a HGV licence by showing my UK driving accreditations, which, because I passed my test when people still went to Mesopotamia on their holidays, has pictures of things like buses and tanks on it.
The minders turned a blind eye. I immediately became power crazed. Is this what tank drivers feel like? Because this Unimog could quite literally drive anywhere it wanted. The ‘working gear’ set (essentially low-range), is so slow it’s like clockwork, and the various diffs, nonsensical tyres and brawny engine made short work of literally everything I pointed it at. Ditches. Mounds. Hills. Walls. It ended with me being forcibly ejected from the cab giggling maniacally. It was so good, I could barely bring myself to have a go in the acid-yellow G500 4x4 Squared that was also lined up. I did put that through its paces, too – but it wasn’t the same.
After that, I was ferried to another section of the facility, a track that seemed to aggregate sections of a miniature
“CUE A DEEP, SOUL-SUCKING MOMENT OF PURE TERROR”
Nürburgring with bits of Monza, a smattering of Hockenheim and a pinch of Spa. Here, I was installed in a road homologation 190E 2.5-16 Evolution II from 1990, and instructed to try and keep up with five-time DTM champ and previous F1 driver Bernd Schneider, who, I hasten to add, was not mucking about. A paltry 235bhp has never felt so much. The car was semi-race, with brakes far better than the car’s ability to test them, and I found myself braking later and later until I eventually pushed it too far and turned in while still trailing the pedal. Cue some flailing, a deep, soul-sucking moment of pure terror followed immediately by a face composed roughly into the most ‘I meant to do that’ visage I could muster.
After a few laps, I came back in, breathless and head spinning. And literally got out of the EVO II and was summarily strapped into one of only 100 CLK DTM AMG Coupés – the only one I’ve ever seen painted in a most un-DTM brandy wine colour. Some 5.5-litres of V8 stuffed into a CLK, 582bhp and 590lb ft and 0–62mph in 3.9secs. It is 16 years old. There was speed. There was swearing. There was an intimate realisation that 16-year-old gearboxes do not do the same things as modern ones. There was the feeling that someone would realise that I wasn’t supposed to really be here, and kick me out. After that, there were GT Rs and one of my personal favourites, an SLS AMG Black Series. But to be honest, I was nearly passing out at this point.
The next day brought a road course. A more leisurely pace. Although not in terms of metal. I danced about in a 1961 300SL Roadster (several million euros’ worth, but who’s counting), a 1971 280SE 3.5 Cab (you might know it as the model that featured in the ‘Hangover’ films), a mint 230E, a 320N Combination Coupé from 1937, a big pimpin’ 560SEC and a couple of others, the least of which was a 2009 CL65 AMG. The least.
And yet that wasn’t the end. The coupé-de-grace [sic], to my self-respect and restraint, came in the form of a banked oval, and very few rules. Laps in a 600 Pullman Limousine were as bizarre and brilliant as they sound. The Hammer was slow but magnificent, bellowing 385bhp into the atmosphere from its 6.0-litre V8, its entire interior a fantastic, sausage-y, black leather sex-dungeon. The gullwing (small ‘g’) C111 II V8 was utter science fiction made Seventies fact, though never actual production, and was light to the touch, rock solid at 130mph. The wedge shape making 200bhp from 3.5-litres feel more like 300.
And yet I was then installed in a 300SL Gullwing, and told to ‘stretch it’. A 1955 car worth more than my soul, a 3.0-litre straight-six, 215bhp and wide. Open. Space. Now, I knew the 300SL only had brakes that suggest deceleration rather than enforce it, but once in a lifetime opportunities are just that. Fourth gear carefully engaged, foot buried, I bottled it at 230kph-plus (over 140mph) with more to come from the car. But I just felt that I’d reached a peak I didn’t want to climb down from on the back of a tow truck. Or ambulance.
Assimilation may take some time, but I intend to write about all the cars once I’ve deciphered the notes hastily written on my phone which appear to consist mainly of exclamation marks and the words ‘BERND SCHNEIDER IS GOD’, ‘GULLWING GO MAX’ and ‘EVO II’ written in capitals. Repeatedly.
I’ve used up six months’ worth of adrenaline, and at least a week’s worth of happiness. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. TopGear Mercedes-Benz retro? Completed it, mate. I hate me too.