A RIDE IN THE SPORTS CAR OF THE CENTURY
It’s 24 years ago, not since Alice moved out from the house next door, but since the Mercedes-Benz 300SL was named as the Sports Car of the Century, the century in this case being the previous one. During the 20th century, the motor car as we know it shape-shifted from a horseless carriage capable of covering ground at around 30 km/h to a weather-proof cocoon capable of cruising all day at close to 300 km/h, if you happened to have a supercar and the German autobahn network at your disposal, that is!
The Mercedes-Benz 300SL came into being in 1954, first as the famous “Gullwing” model with doors that flipped upwards like a bird in flight. Those doors sure were sexy, and the 300SL was on the world’s celebrity want list, with customers of the calibre of Clark Gable, Sophia Loren and even Hugh Heffner of ‘Playboy’ magazine, all scrabbling to get on the waiting list.
But after that first flurry of sales, demand for the Gullwing was falling off, and for its follow-up trick in 1957, Mercedes-Benz introduced the much more conventional 300SL Roadster. This car was much more user-friendly than the race-car-developed Gullwing, and what’s more you could order it with a hard top as an extra to go with the fabric top that could be folded away for fine-weather. Just about every report written on the original 300SL states that while the Gullwing created the wow factor, the Roadster was by far the better, more resolved car.
In the mid-1950s you could order a 300SL with a variety of rear axle ratios. The tallest of these gave a top speed of just over 260 km/h which was mind-blowing in an era where the family Ford Zephyr or Vauxhall Velox rarely saw the far side of 112 km/h (70 mph, as it was generally termed in those days).
Now it’s the first few days of 2024 and I am travelling up the magnificent Outeniqua Pass outside George in a 1958 Merc 300SL Roadster, alongside the car’s owner and local businessman – and Mercedes aficionado – Andre Fourie. I remarked to him that the last time I had driven a 300SL was in 1990 at the famous Nurburgring Nordschleife racetrack, when I was a guest of the Mercedes-Benz motorsport team, which was competing on the shorter modern track. During a lunch break, they commissioned one of the press officers to ride shotgun with me in their museum-piece, and he kept imploring me to “aim for ze stones!” in a heavy German accent. I thought he had lost it big (nerves, dumb South African behind the wheel of a priceless Mercedes icon) until I realised, he meant to aim for the kerbs, so that I could nip the apex of each corner and let it run out wide on the exit.
There was no way I was going to be a hero on my first lap of the Norschleife, and I was pleased to see that Andre was tackling the Outeniqua tarmac in similarly relaxed fashion in a car he knew like the back of his hand. From the passenger seat I could feel how composed the SL was and how accurately he was placing the car, top gear all the way, revelling in the torque from the 2 996-cc overhead camshaft six-cylinder engine.
The red-line on the rev-counter is at 6 000 rpm and earlier on our jaunt Andre had given his Roadster a bit of a squirt in the lower gears. The engine is turbine-smooth, but there is a fair bit of induction noise when pressing on, and the sound is typically reassuring in Mercedes fashion. The revolutionary thing about this engine was that it was the first production engine to offer direct petrol injection, and what’s more, the mechanical system was reliable from the get-go, some 50 years before electronic direct fuel-injection on petrol cars became common just a few years ago.
This car was way ahead of the game in the mid-1950s in handling and ride too, thanks no doubt to the special tubular space-frame chassis, which was modified in the roadster rendition to enable a lower door sill height for easier access than the Gullwing offered. With such a rigid chassis the spring rates could be softened for ride quality and yet still retain enough control to eliminate excessive body roll. There’s also little pitching under braking, although it should be mentioned that this SL is still fitted with drum brakes. Mercedes stuck with drum brakes long after Jaguar had made the disc brake concept famous in the 1950s, and even Triumph used disc brakes on its TR2 sports car from 1953 onwards. Finally, in 1961, disc brakes were offered on the 300SL Roadster, for the last two years of its production run.
Getting into the 300SL takes a bit of dexterity, because although the sills on the Roadster are less radical than they are on the Gullwing, they are still very wide. The cockpit of the 300SL is narrow, and with Andre’s car having the optional hardtop fitted during the time of my ride, it takes a bit of a crouch and articulation of limbs to climb aboard.
The standard seats, upholstered in black leather on Andre’s car, are pucker bucket seats with plenty of side support. They don’t have huge amounts of padding, but they are well-shaped, and they played a big part in my enjoyment of the drive up the pass, as they hold you firmly in place.
Apart from the seats, the cockpit is almost saloon-like in terms of its style and appointments. There are just the two main gauge clusters for speed and rev counter, and, unlike British sports cars of the period, no wood is to be found anywhere, only purposeful, well-finished metal. To gain access to the car, by the way, you have to learn to operate the most interesting of needle-like levers which can be flipped outwards to act as door handles.
More than any other aspect of the package, perhaps, the characteristic that is most impressive about the 300SL is the way everything happens without any display of drama. The roadability is very high, the gearchange is slick and uncomplicated, and this is unlike so many other Gran Turismo cars of the period, which were very demanding to drive.
I suspect it was this effortlessness of operation – not to mention a very high-speed capability for the period – that gave the Mercedes-Benz 300SL the nod for its Car of the Century title. Another aspect of its efficiency was that the narrowness of its cockpit and the small glass area it presented to the front of the car gave it excellent aerodynamics and no doubt contributed to its top speed, which saw it rated as the fastest production car in the world in the mid-1950s.
It didn’t hurt the image that it was developed directly from the first racing 300SLs, which conquered both the 1952 Le Mans 24-Hour and the Carrera Panamericana, a brutal three-day road race across Mexico. And it still looked a lot like the ultimate racing version of the 300SL, the eight-cylinder SLR, which famously won the 1955 Mille Miglia in the hands of Stirling Moss and his motorsport journalist/navigator Denis Jenkinson.
A total of 1 858 Mercedes-Benz 300SL roadsters were built between 1957 and 1963, which is not a huge number. By comparison, the 300SL Gullwing Coupe began its production life in 1954 and was phased out in 1957, after a total of 400 of these Gullwings were built. So, the grand total of original 300SL’s stands at 3 258 units. As an interesting comparison, a total of 72 528 of the relatively more affordable Jaguar E-Type were built between 1961 and 1975.
The Mercedes-Benz 300SL remains one of the most collectable of all Mercedes-Benz cars, and in South Africa there are currently known to be nine examples residing here – eight of them Roadsters, and one Gullwing Coupé.
Oh, and by the way, the Mercedes-Benz 300SL celebrates its 70th birthday this year!
by Stuart Johnston
