Mercedes 300SL
During the just passed weekend I got the chance to visit the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart. The time there was worth spent not to mention that it took almost half a day to walk through all the floors and look and listen to all the Mercedes history.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the German company has also produced aircraft engines, motorcycles and bicycles and has brought forth many engineering solutions, for example from aircraft engines to racing engines and than from the racing track on the normal road and I have the best example for this: the 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL, the fastest production car of it's day!
The 300SL describes the 2995 cc straight-6 engine and the "SL" stands for "Sport Leicht" or put in plain English "Sport Light". The car has it's origin on the race track, being based on the highly successful 1952 Mercedes-Benz 300SL racing model, code named W194. The 1954 road model 300SL was codenamed W198.
Noteworthy is also that the 300SL was the first production car to feature direct chamber injection, technology that Mercedes took from aeroplane engines, which made the car's engine able to produce almost 230 PS, compared to the actual carbureted racetrack version which developed only 115 horse power (86kW). The direct injection was a Bosch mechanical direct fuel injection system.
This particular car was requested by the New York Mercedes distributor and official USA importer Max Hoffman. He told the Mercedes-Benz AG management in Stuttgart Germany that the market, especially the US market, is well prepared for such a car taking into account the economic boom after the Second World War. More than 80% of the vehicles produced were sold in the USA.
After it was first introduced in 1954 as a closed sports car with distinctive gull-winged doors the German car company also offered the 300SL as a open roadster. Until the production of the model ended in 1963 Mercedes sold 1400 gull-winged coupe units and 1858 roadster units.
Today the value of this car is quite high being a popular collection item for car enthusiasts. In 2009 a couple of 300SL models were offered for sale from the Foxwood Collection at over $1.3 Million US Dollars.
I'm a car passionate and loved photographing this car, I think it is the car I took most of my time on from the entire Stuttgart Mercedes Museum and trust me it had plenty to offer. For most of the shots I used the available light and the on camera flash did not help as much as patience did. Why patience ? I had to wait for all the other museum visitors to pass by, to photograph the car, to try again or to listen to the guide while walking round the car.
I'll post more about other cars I have photographed during my visitation in the coming days.
Until then..
Cheers! Z.