WHY THE MERCEDES GULLWING IS SO GREAT
It was the morning of the third and final day of the 2013 Mille Miglia Storica, that 1000-mile speed tour through Italy, and the entire pack of some 400 cars charged out of Rome with their tails on fire. Mercedes PR man Geoff Day and I were fully bedded into our dirty red 1955 300SL Gullwing from the Mercedes heritage fleet, proceeding with a high level of confidence as we threaded through the Fifties Jags and Thirties Alfas to catch up with some other Gullwings that left ahead of us. We spotted our man. He was in a red 300SL like ours, but it was cleaner, as was his driving.
This story originally appeared in Volume 22 of Road & Track.
Along the high, narrow, block-curbed roads heading north to Florence, this guy’s car placement was centimeter-perfect. He was using all the road available, accelerating hard out of corners, nearly clipping the six-inch-high curbing but never quite. His braking points were spot on too. If this were one of those online master classes, it would be titled “How to Effectively Drive the Piss out of a $2 Million Gullwing like It’s Not Yours.”
But it was his. After an hour of doggedly trying to stay within a couple of car lengths of that red SL, we arrived at our lunch spot. He got out. We saw the white hair and realized our bogey was none other than “The Captain,” Roger Penske. “That was hard work, wasn’t it?” he said. We laughed. He was wearing a full Nomex suit. We were wearing polo shirts and jeans. His car had five-point harnesses. Ours had lap belts. Penske looked at us, he looked in our car, and, shaking his head, he said, “You guys are crazy.”
Maybe, but we didn’t feel crazy. The 1955 300SL is a machine of such stout grace, such athletic invincibility, that any decent driver can hop in and feel confident chasing down Roger Penske while wearing only street clothes and lap belts. The Gullwing was reverse-engineered from a long-distance racing car, endowing it with an understressed, placid demeanor in hard use. It has depths the average driver will never plumb. But unlike with a modern racing car, the core of its performance is accessible to nearly anyone. The 300SL may have been the first to do what all subsequent great Mercedes-Benzes have done: make you a better driver.
How this car came to be is a whole megillah. The original SL racer rolled out of Stuttgart-Untertürkheim just seven years after World War II, as Mercedes went seeking glory and redemption in sports-car racing. Money and time were too tight to create a dedicated competition powertrain, so Mercedes development chief Rudolf Uhlenhaut built an endurance machine around the carbureted 115-hp 3.0-liter straight-six and four-speed transmission from the stately 300-series four-door. The resulting car, in open and closed forms, was the 1952 W194 300SL.
Though he was able to extract another 60 hp from the 3.0-liter six, Uhlenhaut knew he would still be outgunned on the grid, so he worked to reduce mass and cheat air. An aluminum space frame of conjoined triangles made up the structure—light, stiff, and cheap. The W194 frame weighed just 140 to 150 pounds, depending on the car. Uhlenhaut canted the straight-six at a 50-degree angle to lower the center of gravity and reduce the frontal area, and he slipped it into a capsule shape that further reduced drag.
The only problem was the coupe’s doors. Full-depth conventional doors would have cut into the space frame and weakened the structure. For racers of the open 300SL, there was no issue—just open the front-hinged half doors that maintained the high-sided frame elements and slide over the wide sill. But the coupes needed another solution, and the FIA rulebook was uncharacteristically mute about cutting into the roof and hinging the doors there. So that’s what they did. Those gullwing doors were a dramatic addition to an already dramatic design, but they were a practical consideration, not a stylistic one.
Enter Max Hoffman, Mercedes-Benz’s then-new U.S. importer. Hoffman saw in the W194’s victories a marketing moment to seize. He convinced Mercedes to build a roadgoing version of the W194 for his American customers. Today we recognize it as the 300SL Gullwing (and the 300SL roadster), project name W198. It made its debut not at Frankfurt, as was the norm for new Mercedes-Benz models, but at the 1954 New York auto show. It was the first truly American Mercedes and also a gigantic leap of faith, considering that Benz had sold just 41 cars to Americans before World War II.
The roadgoing W198 300SL is very much the home version of the W194, barely watered down and in some cases toned up. All the key elements of the racing SL are there, such as the space frame (steel now), the laid-down engine arrangement, the independent suspension with rear swing axles hinged at the differential, and, of course, the elegant gullwing doors.
But there were some changes. Significantly, the new car ditched the W194’s three twin-barrel Solex carburetors for gasoline direct injection (GDI), courtesy of Bosch. The technology saw wide use in German aircraft engines in World War II, but this was the first instance of a four-stroke GDI in an automobile, and it boosted the engine’s output from 175 to an alleged 215 hp.
The interior also saw some alterations for the road, but fewer than you might expect. Instead of a removable four-spoke wooden steering wheel, the Gullwing has a huge white two-spoke unit that folds back into the kneewell to facilitate ingress. W198 drivers still check the same instrument panel as in the racer, with a prominent tach-and-speedo binnacle. The big dash-mounted war-surplus Junghans chronometer doesn’t survive into the W198, however. And the seats certainly have more padding than the metal-sided buckets in the racer. The smart buyer could still opt for the blue-and-gray racing tartan.
Our Mille Miglia Storica car had black leather seats, and though they appeared rudimentary, they were extraordinarily supportive and place holding on the event’s 14- to 16-hour days. Comfort is the SL’s secret weapon. And not just the comfort of its seats—its compliant ride and civilized straight-six hum felt like spa treatments on those long, dusty routes. As the rally wore on, we caught envious glances from other contestants clearly exhausted by the noise, chop, and general crudeness of their Ferrari 340 Mexicos and Jag C-types. In this sense, the SL is very much like a modern-day supercar: performance and drivability in harmony.
And I have no recollection of the car feeling underpowered (maybe relative to a period V-12 racing Ferrari or something). On those narrow mountain roads, the 300SL felt indomitable—not just fast, but unrelenting and unstoppable. Torque is everywhere, explosive over 3500 rpm, and we were able to attach ourselves to everyone’s bumpers using just second and third gears. In a car weighing roughly 2800 pounds, a palpably underrated 215 hp gave our SL the weight-to-power equivalent of a modern-day Honda Civic Type R or thereabouts. In other words, the right amount for the road, even 70 years later.
I should repeat the word unstoppable. The drum brakes are the only real weak part of the SL. In tight two-lane scenarios, you have to shimmy the steering wheel coming into turns to slow down the front end and get the thing to turn in. A more satisfying way to corner is just to come in too hot and lift. The rear of the car goes light (especially without much gas in the 34-gallon tank), the swing axles rise up and shorten the rear track, and the back end steps out and points you past the apex, sluing the car in wide, predictable arcs. Throw in some countersteering and get back on the throttle, and you sail straight through the corner. Now you’re driving a Gullwing the way God and Rudolf Uhlenhaut intended.