It was the year 1952, and Mercedes had just won a series of
prominent international racing events with their W194 racecar. And that's all
it was, a racecar, an experiment; they had no plans to put the car into
production. But thankfully fate intervened.
A New York City-based automobile importer named Max Hoffman
had recently signed a contract to import Mercedes' cars to the U.S.A. As a
former racecar driver himself, Hoffman's attention was then captured by the
W194's victories making the news rounds. I'm guessing Hoffman was eager for a
chance to drive the car himself, but the fact is that he knew cars as well as
he knew customers, and he felt strongly that a roadgoing version of the W194
was something his well-heeled clientele would line up to buy.
He lobbied Mercedes to build one, and while they were
initially resistant, Hoffman employed some clever tactics to get them to agree.
(That story, and Hoffman's subsequent influence on auto design history, is
fascinating enough that it will get its own entry later.) Based on Hoffman's
prompting Mercedes greenlit the W198, a road-ready version of the W194.
Now we turn to why the car has gullwing doors in the first
place. As we learned in the entry on its W194
antecedent, the car was constructed using an unusual system of alloy tubes
assembled into interconnected triangles. This gave the frame the necessary
rigidity at an extremely low weight. But in order to achieve enough rigidity in
the areas flanking the passenger compartment, the framing had to extend upwards
much higher than your average car door's sill. This precluded the possibility
of designing a car door that would allow sufficient room for the driver and
passenger's ingress and egress.
In the roofless versions of the W194 racecar, this was no
problem: The driver could climb in and out.
For the enclosed W194 versions, like the one below that took
second place in Italy's 1952 Mille Miglia endurance race, Mercedes engineers
had to work out a point of access.
Mercedes chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut and his team looked
at the problem: creating a conventional door above the high sill line was not
an option—the resultant aperture would be too small for any human, even a
racecar driver, to be expected to clamber through. They clearly needed to
enlarge the aperture, but there was no way to go down, not without
compromising the frame. The only way to go was up, incorporating a chunk
of roof into the door. That would make a hole large enough for a driver and
co-driver to get into. But how the heck would you hinge such a thing?
They then decided to hinge the thing at the top. I
cannot stress enough how radical a design twist this was in those days, when
every other car door opened on a horizontal plane.
Sticklers of auto design history will point out that
fourteen years earlier, in 1939, Jean Bugatti had quietly designed papillon ("butterfly")
doors that opened at an upward angle for the Bugatti Type 64; I'd point out
that the design was never realized in mass production, and that fourteen years
earlier much of the world (and particularly Germany) was embroiled in a World
War, and Uhlenhaut and his team were decidedly not ogling Bugatti's design on
Facebook.
Jean Bugatti, by the way, tragically died at age 30 in 1939,
the same year he designed the papillon doors, while testing a
race-winning prototype. A freaking drunken bicyclist, of all things, wandered
onto the track during Jean's run; he swerved to avoid him, wrapped the
prototype around a tree, and died.
The end result is that Uhlenhaut and his team are widely
credited with the invention of the gullwing door, and that elegant design
solution (coupled with the car's legendary fuel-injected performance) has
rendered the 300SL Gullwing an automotive icon. Clambering in and out of the
vehicle is still an awkward affair, mitigated somewhat by a steering wheel
designed to tilt downwards to admit your legs; but goddamn is it cool, and the
upshot is you'll never ding that door into the car next to you.
Just six months after Hoffman's last, successful plea,
Mercedes had a floor model ready for prime time. They typically displayed their
new models at the auto show in Frankfurt, but as per Hoffman's assurances that
he could sell the 300SL to Americans, they took the unusual step of unveiling
the car at the 1954 New York Auto Show instead.
The response was tremendous. According to the automotive fan site Serious Wheels, members of the
press "were falling over themselves to lavish praise on the 300 SL:"
"Autosport" reported that: "The exterior form
of the 300 SL is quite wonderful and its performance almost unbelievable. The
construction of the car and its production quality are first class and the
whole concept represents an uncompromising realization of all the new
ideas."
After its initial test, "Road & Track" wrote:
"We are looking at a car where a comfortable interior is complemented by
remarkably impressive handling characteristics, quite incredible roadholding,
light and precise steering, and performance levels which are up there with—and even
an improvement on—the best cars the automotive industry has to offer. There is
only one thing left to say: the sports car of the future has become a
reality."
And "auto, motor und sport" noted: "The
Mercedes 300 SL is the most refined and at the same time the most inspirational
sports car of our era—an automotive dream."
For Mercedes to go from a luxury car to a prize-winning
racecar to an influential Manhattan showroom, all in the span of less than five
years, was a long road. But after the reception at the New York Auto Show,
Mercedes turned on the production line.
A persistent Hoffman received his first shipment of 300SL
Gullwings in 1955, handing some 1,100 sets of keys over to eager buyers for the
next three years.
The American market was responsible for the lion's share of
300SL Gullwings. Before doing research and learning about Hoffman, I'd assumed
the car had been designed for Germany's Autobahn; but Mercedes only produced
300 units for domestic sale. Hoffman's persistence and Uhlenhaut's brilliant
design and engineering skills had yielded a highly-sought-after triumph of
design, one that looks just as good today as it did in 1954.
source: http://www.core77.com/blog/transportation/auto_design_history_origin_of_the_mercedes_300sl_gullwing_part_3_-_mercedes_gets_convinced_and_heads_to_new_york_23900.asp
by Rain Noe
http://www.boscheuropean.com
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