The Rally Roadster

My first car was a new 1955 Plymouth convertible. I was an undergraduate at Yale, and my best friend’s father bought him a new 190SL. I started comparing my Plymouth to his 190SL, and I decided that Mercedes-Benz built one hell of a car!

I went to Columbia for my masters then headed to Purdue for my PhD. I still had the Plymouth, but I wanted a 190SL in the worst way. My mother found me a used 1958 190SL advertised in our local newspaper in New Jersey. My father took the Plymouth, and I spent everything I had on the SL.

First Lesson

By the time I got to Indiana, I had figured out that even though this Mercedes-Benz was only three – years old, it was a rusted-out junker. It wouldn’t track on a winding road because the tie-rod ends were floating around, and the oil pressure was 15 psi!

My father took pity on me and bought a new short-block. I had to learn on the spot how to be a Mercedes-Benz mechanic. I met an old-time master mechanic in Logansport, Indiana, and he helped. I think he found my enthusiastic incompetence entertaining. Eventually, I re-did all the mechanicals on the 190SL, but I still had a rusted-out car!

Using window screen, bondo, and pages of the Indianapolis Star, I re-sculpted all the fenders. I got somebody to paint the car for $50. I went to the local shoe store and bought Magic Shoe Dye and made the red leather interior as shiny as a pair of lady’s sling-back pumps. By the time I got done, I’d fallen in love with Mercedes-Benz. In fact, double-dating in a 190SL without a console center tray was a new experience.

First 300SL

In the mid- sixties I got done with school and came back East to Philadelphia to work for General Electric as a chemical physicist. The 190SL disintegrated around me, but I was making money, so I bought an alloy engine 1962 300SL Roadster, a fin-back sedan, and another 190SL, a 1962 Roadster.            

One Saturday morning in 1969 a friend called and said a 300SL was advertised in the local paper with no price. The car had been in an accident and was in a body shop in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. I had just finished a project for which I’d been paid $2,000, and coincidentally I’d driven through Willow Grove on Friday and seen a wrecked Roadster in a body shop. It was the same car! I offered $1,600 cash, got the paperwork on Saturday afternoon, and had the car pulled out of the body shop on a flatbed at 7 A.M. Monday. I was there with a broom to sweep up the loose parts.

This car was no virgin. It had been in at least one accident, so I decided to replace all the body panels. Back then you could buy 300SL sheet metal brand new, so I bought all-new NOS panels for this car.

Long-Term Project

Researching the car, I discovered it was a stock 1957 Roadster, nothing special, completed around October 20th, 1957 and delivered to the USA. The only unusual thing was the color, DB 218, Linden Green. Only four Roadster seem to have been painted this color, number 510, 511, and 512 and a fourth in 1959. There’s also one coupe listed in the Gullwing Registry as Linden Green.

In 1957, when these cars came out, they had “bullseye” headlights with the circle in the center. Daimler-Benz phased-out those headlights in 1959 and went to asymmetric headlights. I bought the correct bullseye lights for this car in 1970. Originally, I put them on my 1962 alloy-engined Roadster, but when I realized how rare they were, I took them off and stored them.

In 1971, I started a Mercedes-Benz restoration shop, Precision Autoworks. One of the first things I did was have a couple of the guys pull the nose off this 300SL and sort of straighten it out. My first idea was to repair the damage and make the car a driver. I was still working at General Electric, and a lot of business came into the shop, so old number 510 got shuttled to one side. I started collecting parts for it so that someday, when I got around to it, I could restore the car. I bought everything that was available in the early 1970’s.

Parts Hunting

Roser produced the original vegetable-dyed leather for Daimler-Benz. In 1972 or so, when we were starting in business, a man from Michigan wanted original Roser leather for his restoration. Even back then, reproduction leather wasn’t right. I had a friend in Germany, a doctor and 300SL owner named Richard Koch. Between the three of us we put together an order for Roser that made it worth their while to make us authentic hides. We ordered red, black, and tan – but not the 1060 Natural in my green car. Dr. Koch coerced Roser into doing a few hides for me along with this order. So the leather in this car was actually produced in the early Seventies and has been preserved since.

The carpeting is another story. Mercedes-Benz carpeting has seven squares to the inch and is solid in color. Today’s reproduction carpet has a looser weave and a little white tuft in it. It’s actually closer to Porsche carpet than Mercedes-Benz carpet. Back in the Seventies, Fred Lustig, the liaison between The Gull Wing Group and Mercedes-Benz, managed to obtain some original carpet end rolls for them. He sold me the carpet in this car, and I preserved it for three decades, too. Its unobtainable today.

By 1978 I could afford to leave GE and run Precision Autoworks full-time. I had seven full-time employees and five major subcontractors. We had the skills in-house to make fenders, frame sections, and more; it didn’t seem to matter, we could build it ourselves. One thing I’d learned by then was that just because sheet metal is New Old Stock doesn’t mean it will bolt right on. There’s a lot of custom work to fitting a new fender onto an old car. It gradually became clear that for number 510, I was going to be better off repairing the original body than fitting a new body.

In the end, we installed a new nose and hood to repair the accident damage, but everything else is original. There’s a lot of handwork and fabrication in the restoration of original panels, but they are original. Working between other projects, by 1981 or so, we had the body re-done and in primer.

Accessories After the Fact

By then I’d been working on these cars for over 20 years. I wasn’t bored, but I’d gotten a little… jaundiced. For two decades, I’d also been reading everything I could find about these cars. I knew about Paul OShea’s two aluminum-bodied 300SLS racers, about the European rally cars, about the special options that could be ordered from the factory.

Gullwings were competitive in racing and rallying, so some of them were hopped-up by the factory or private owners with performance parts. By 1957, though, the 300SL had to compete against the Ferrari 250 GT and the V-8 Corvette, and the Roadster simply wasn’t fast enough. So very few 300SL Roadsters were modified for competition. Talking to every 300SL expert I could find, the general consensus was that about six production 1957 Roadsters were modified with special features for racing or rallying.

One of these cars was said to have crashed and burned at the Nurburgring. Another still belongs to ex-factory rally driver Eugen Bohringer, but all special equipment was removed by the racing department before he was allowed to buy that car in 1963. Another car with chrome Rudge wheels and a high-compression engine was sold to a Pontiac dealer in New Jersey. That car passed through Paul Russell’s hands to a well-known New England collector. As for the two Paul O’Shea racing cars, I think they were ultimately stripped by Daimler-Benz and sold as production cars. Nobody knows for sure.

In a sense, this was the blueprint for today’s AMG program. AMG today is a Mercedes-Benz factory performance package, and similar options existed in the 1950s. then, though, the factory options weren’t as well publicized as AMG options are now.

In 1957 the cars started out as production 300SL Roadsters then were modified by the factory before delivery. Factory literature describes the options. In 1957 any buyer could have ordered any 300SL Roadster with two dozen special items. It’s just that nobody did. If you ordered every possible option, including the hardtop, it would have added roughly $1,200 to the $10,970 price of a new 300SL. That was a lot of money back then.

I decided, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have something different, something nobody else has? That’s when I got the idea to put all the 1957 performance options into one car. This car.

Wheel Deals

Meanwhile I had become a close friend of Joe Saje from Mercedes-Benz of North America. Through his connections, Joe was able to corral obsolete parts from all over the world. For example, I knew my car should have the optional Rudge chrome knock-off wheels, but only about 28 Roadsters were built with Rudge wheels. Joe was able to get me axles, spindles, backing plates and all the other neat little bits. The only things he couldn’t get were the wheels!

In 1982, or so, I bought a Gullwing with nine Rudge wheels, but they were 5-inch, not the 5.5-inch rims that came on Roadsters. About the same time, a customer bought a Gullwing out of Venezula that was really screwed up. Among other things, it had 5.5-inch Rudge wheels off a Roadster. After a little discussion, I allowed him to convince me that we should trade so his car could have the proper 5-inch wheels.

So now I had four 5.5-inch Rudge wheels. Along came another customer with a Gullwing that had six Rudge wheels because the original owner drove it in the winter and put snow tires on the spares. So I traded this owner some work in the shop for one of his wheels. It was a 5-inch. Finally, a year or so later, along came yet another Gullwing that had a 5.5-inch Rudge wheel as the spare, so I traded the 5-inch wheel for the 5.5-inch wheel I needed.

Of course, once you have Rudge wheels, you need the special holder for the spare wheel to mount in the trunk. I told my friend Terry Hawirko in Canada, who makes reproduction spare wheel holders, “I don’t want your repro, I want the original from which you made your patterns”. He was very nice; he actually let me buy his original Rudge spare wheel holder.

Tires were a problem. Dunlop R5 racing tires were no longer available. People were using R6s, which interfered with the wheel-wells and were too large to fit the spare tire well. Some of us got together and ordered enough R5s that Dunlop was convinced to run a batch. Just getting the tires took two years.

Throughout the Eighties, I kept looking for more things for this car. I was looking for 1957 factory special options; I wasn’t thinking “rally car” per se. I simply wanted all the options that could have been ordered from a Mercedes-Benz dealer in 1957.

More Goodies

Stock 300SLs had an 8.6:1 compression ratio, but optional special pistons raised that to 9.5:1. Nobody could find 9.5:1 pistons. Lynn Yakels’ wife, Roberta Nichols, a well-known engineer high up at Ford, got to the right people at the experimental lab at Mahle in Germany and convinced them to make 9.5:1 pistons. They built six sets; a couple vintage racers in California got sets, and so did I. A few 300SLs had a high performance 4.11:1 differential; 300SL guru Peter Thomas in Arizona found me a 4.11 gearset: factory parts, in the box.

In the mid-Ninties, Gordon Beck educated me about vintage rally equipment, and my concept began changing. Gordon found the Halda Speedpilot and the Heuer Monte-Carlo stopwatch. Lynn Yakel provided the other Heuer, a Super Autavia. Mercedes-Benz originally offered a wooden box that bolted into the trunk and held bulbs, fuses, points, hoses, and other spare parts. Peter Thomas came up with an original box, and I rounded up the proper spares and the original paper tags with the wire braid on the end.

I knew this car shouldn’t have bumpers; illustrations of the bumper-less option are in the 1957 dealer brochure. The problem was how to mount the license lights without a bumper. I’d even bought similarly shaped Rolls-Royce taillights and modified them. Then one day in a Mercedes-Benz junkyard in Morgantown, Pennsylvania, I lifted the lid of a parts bucket, and there was a set of Mercedes-Benz taillights just like the ones in the old illustrations, including Paul O’Shea’s ’57 300SLS. I still don’t know what they came off of or how they ended up in a bucket in this junkyard in the middle of nowhere!

Another problem was the aluminum anodized molding covering the horizontal seam behind the rear wheel wells. Photos of prototype Roadsters show this molding going all the way around the back, as do illustrations of the bumper-less option. Very early Roadsters have this continuous molding, but after the first few the molding was shortened, probably because somebody at Daimler-Benz realized there was no point in putting a molding that was hidden by the bumper. What happened if you ordered the bumper-less option- full or partial molding? I opted for a partial molding.

What about covers for the bumper mounting holes? Some old photos show them held on by screws into the bodywork. In others they have hidden retainers. I opted for the smoothest covers I could make.

The hardtop was a lucky find. My friend Gary Berger had a car with its hardtop still in the original crate, DB 344 blue with code 1060 leather. This leather color was perfect for me because now we wouldn’t have to pull the rear window and re-upholster the back ledge, which is a nasty job.

Up front I put Marchal driving lights over the bumper mounting holes, which seems logical. Some rally drivers mounted a third light in the center of the grille where the star should be, which seemed awkward to me. I decided not to do that, for aesthetic reasons.

Restoration Partner

Around 1998 I had the concept of building a 1957 300SL “special option” rally car, and I had all the parts, but I was still faced with an expensive restoration because everything had to be custom. It wasn’t going to be like restoring a stock 300SL. Out of the blue, Mercedes-Benz dealer Alan Sockol of Contemporary Motorcars in New Jersey, called. Alan is an old customer for whom we’ve done a lot of work, and he wanted a Mercedes-Benz rally car for events like the New England 1000 and the Colorado Grand.

I explained the concept to Alan and asked, “Do you want to be part of this?”. He agreed, so I figured what the project was then worth. Alan paid me half to do it, and we agreed to split the restoration costs. Its been a perfect marriage because Alan understands what’s involved.

This has been an ongoing project. When first completed, for example, the car wore an original Nardi wooden steering wheel because in pictures, the Tak/De Boer 300SL in the 1958 Monte Carlo Rally had a Nardi wheel, so we decided that’s what our car should have. But when factory racing mechanic Ernie Thiel saw the car at the Greenwhich Concours, he said the Nardi wheel was never a factory option. He remembered working on high-performance SLs, including O’Shea’s cars, and the European rally cars had the stock white 300SL wheel. So that’s what our car has now.

Accessory Showcase

Could someone build another car like this? In a word, no. I couldn’t have done it without my contacts at Mercedes-Benz and The Gull Wing Group in this country and in Europe. It took 30 years to assemble the right parts, they’re all original, and many of them are simply no longer available at any cost.

captioned by Rich Taylor as narrated by Bob Platz