Motoring | Features

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL

The Gullwing traded race tracks for public roads thanks to America’s insatiable thirst for sportscars in the Fifties

By Dejan Jovanovic, wheels
Published: 11:52 January 31, 2013

Image Credit: Supplied picture
A great, usable 300 SL can be had for half a million dollars and less, but cars are regularly changing hands for over $1.5 million.

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The 1953 Chevrolet Corvette launched a legendary nameplate that, 60 years later, is the longest-running continuously produced sportscar in automotive history. Mercedes-Benz was just a year too late to grab this acclaim, because its legendary Gullwing SL sportscar appeared in 1954.

The Stuttgart carmaker’s famed engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut quite liked what he saw in Mercedes-Benz’s W186 saloon (call it an early-Fifties S-Class). He based a racecar loosely on the limousine and used a six-cylinder engine developed from a road-going unit — the heavy powerplant meant Uhlenhaut saved weight everywhere else, designing a tubular-frame chassis and skinning the beautiful car in aluminium bodywork.

The rigid frame necessitated high sides, which meant there were no side-hinged doors to increase flex. Instead Uhlenhaut simply fitted roof-hinged doors, perhaps unwittingly giving the car its legendary Gullwing moniker.

After the 300 SL lived up to its promise and won some important races, American Mercedes-Benz importer Maximilian Edwin Hoffman pressed the company’s board of directors for the introduction of a new road-going sportscar in order to meet US market demand. The top brass obliged by putting the 300 SL racecar on the road.

Hoffman’s predictions were right, and within 17 months, 85 per cent of all 996 Gullwings produced went to America. As other markets started receiving their fair share of 300 SLs, US buyers kept snatching the majority of the glorious cars accounting for 51 per cent of all the 1,400 coupés and 1,858 roadsters produced up to 1963.

This means that if anyone’s in the hunt for one of these legendary cars, well, it’s open season over in the USA. Steel-bodied cars command far, far lower prices than all-aluminium cars (of which less than 30 were built), which were seriously costly options back in the day. If there’s an aluminium-block engine of a later-year model out there, they’ll be well over $1 million (Dh3.67 million).

A great, usable 300 SL can be had for half a million dollars and less, but cars are regularly changing hands for over $1.5 million especially examples that are hotted-up by the factory. These rare models have a host of aluminium components replacing regular steel items, and hotter ignition and cams, as well as different fuel-injection (yes, the Gullwing was one of the first cars to use fuel injection).