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The event that caused former Mercedes-Benz racing boss, Alfred Neubauer, to claimed that his second childhood began on May 2, 1952 was the return of Mercedes-Benz to motor racing for the first time since 1939. The vehicle of choice for Mercedes-Benz's return was the infamous 300SL sports car. Designed in 1951 for the 1952 sports car racing season, Mercedes' number one goal for the year was to win Le Mans. Their goal was achieved with a one-two finish although a Talbot was in the lead with one hour to go. The lone Talbot driver, Pierre Levegh, missed a shift and blew the cars' engine leaving the Mercedes team to run to the finish uncontested. That's racing. The winning 300SL was driven by Hermann Lang and Fritz Reiss while the second placed car was driven by Theo Helfrich and Norbert Niedermeyer. The 300SL has become legend for many reasons, one of which is its advanced design. The unique shape of the 300SL's sheetmetal produces an incredibly low coefficient of drag of only 0.25. Modern cars average between 0.35 and 0.30. To make this feat even more incredible is the fact that there were no computers to aid in the design for aero-efficiency. The 300SL sheetmetal would be useless if it were not wrapped around the super-strong space frame chassis. There are no standard chassis "rails", just an intricate jungle-gym of tubes. 300SL Roadster production began in 1955 and continued through 1963. In the end 1,858 roadsters were produced. Compare this to the original Coupe design that was produced from 1954 (introduced in New York) to 1957 and saw 1,400 examples built. The Roadster is claimed to be the better car as it incorporated advancements over the Coupe version. |