Month: March 2020

It is not a widely known fact that Spaghetti Carbonara, one of the most iconic Italian dishes, eaten around the world, actually is connected with America. Yes, really. When Italy was finally captured by the Allies, American soldiers brought into the cuisine of the war-stricken and impoverished country a part of their lavish rations, namely bacon and eggs. Italians incorporated those luxuries into their cooking, and there we have it, spaghetti carbonara (some typical Japanese dishes also owe their provenance to the presence of the American army of occupation).

When Fiat teamed up with Chrysler thanks to the late and lamented Sergio Marchionne, many “purists” raised the alarm that by using Chrysler hardware and software, the Italians were contaminating the truly Italian brands. They were wrong. The Italian automotive industry had, in the past, benefited greatly from situations where American engines were installed in sports cars built in Emilia Romagna and other parts of Italy, those like Bizzarrini, Italmeccanica, Iso, De Tomaso and Intermeccanica. The current Maserati range shares some invisible components with other FCA products, and that is a good thing, as it improves reliability and lets the brand invest where it really counts for enthusiasts.

When I learned I was going to receive the new Maserati Ghibli Diesel Gran Lusso with an interior designed by the fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna I immediately knew I wanted to use it to search for something very Italian, but rooted here, in Britain. Italian engineering and cuisine have both seen widespread popularity all over the world, and the people who know that most Ferraris are red also know what a pizza looks like. The elegant Ghibli and its powerful turbodiesel are just the ticket to explore the tree-lined roads of Cambridgeshire. The throaty sound produced by the motor makes the journey more pleasant, although it’s produced by the Active Sound System, two resonators placed strategically next to the twin tailpipes, enhancing the sound without recourse to such gauche methods as those used by, for instance, BMW and Audi, with a fake engine note delivered via loudspeakers. It’s also a bit better than the sound from the Bowers & Wilkins stereo, which frankly disappointed me.

On the positive side, the steering is incredibly precise and beautifully weighted, and makes every corner a joy. The suspension keeps body movements in check in a way that other premium manufacturers have largely forgotten. This is a car which feels right at home in city traffic, on a highway and on twisty country roads with adverse cambers, crests and dips, and expansion joints; it makes the driver feel confident of using all the 275 hp and the huge 600 Nm of torque. The Ghibli Diesel makes the 0-100 km/h sprint in 6.3 seconds, and reaches a top speed of 250 km/h. Is it a viable alternative to the dominant German cars? An emphatic yes.

The drive to the old river port of St. Ives was all too short, but the promise of the perfectly cooked Italian food at the Amore restaurant (http://www.amorestives.co.uk) compensated for that. We started with a simple Bruschetta (perfect and aromatic) and a Calamari starter. The latter is a dish slow-cooked in order to remove every last hint of the prevalent sponginess of calamari. Marin, the chef, really knows the little secrets of his trade. Next, it’s time for the Rigatoni al Ragù di Manzo (tubular pasta in a rich beef stew, topped with parmesan shavings, cooked to perfection with the sauce just sticky enough to cling to the pasta). I am tempted to try the Guanciale di Bue, which is slow-cooked ox cheeks in red wine and rosemary sauce, served with vegetables and crushed new potatoes.

The beef dissolves in my mouth and requires no chewing, it’s probably the best-tasting stewed beef I have ever tried. I can hardly eat any more food, but I need to try one more dish, the intriguingly named Linguine ai Gamberoni e Alghe del Gargano. It is a specialty of Gargano in Apulia and consists of linguine cooked in tomato sauce with chili, roasted pepper, king prawns and samphire. The samphire imbues the sauce with a strong herbal flavor which perfectly complements the soft, ideally roasted peppers. The meal ends with that, and the drive home highlights the fact that almost everything about this car is Italian: the stylishly tailored Zegna upholstery, the sporty road manners and the fact that people actually look at it, while not sparing the plentiful Mercedes and Audi cars a second glance.

I could live with this car. It is sporty enough to replace a coupe, and comfortable enough to serve as a luxury sedan: the best of both worlds. And it can bring me to the Italian restaurant again… and to the gym later.

In terms of performance, the heavy 600 was no slouch, it reached a maximum speed of around 205 kph, and did the 0-100 kph sprint in less than 10 seconds (for comparison: the 1964 model Porsche 911 did it in 8 seconds…). The first Pullman I ever drove, however, was much slower than that. It happened on a gloomy day in Germany. I came to Fellbach by taxicab to pick up my ride. When I walked in I was shown a stripped out W100, ready for restoration work, and a refurbished M100 engine, so I could understand better what I was dealing with. Then I was handed a key. A single, well-worn and battered key with a piece of cardboard attached to it with a piece of string. On the cardboard I found a note: “Mr. Frankowski, the air suspension on the car is broken, please don’t drive it sideways.”

Indeed the air suspension was not functional (normally it provided three positions, low, high and lock for changing a wheel or for transport), and I was lucky they had let me have the car at all. It was THE single W100 Sonderschutz prototype from 1965, aka The Werkspanzer, which had been leased to the West German government for several decades but remained in Mercedes-Benz ownership throughout. During its 30 years of service, it had covered around 50,000 km, carrying such Chancellors as Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, and reputedly also such visiting dignitaries as the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. The car, which weighed in at 5.5 tons empty, had additional torsion bars fitted in the suspension to carry the armored body with its full B7-grade protection. Its specially designed Fulda tires (their size for nerds: 9.00 H 15 8/10 PR) could not handle speeds higher than around 100 kph, but it had spent most of its life between Bonn, the then capital of West Germany, and the government residence in Petersberg, close to Bonn, where foreign dignitaries stayed overnight, including Brezhnev, who crashed the SL Mercedes given to him as a present on the access road, while completely drunk, against a tree.

I touched the gloss black body with reverence. It wore its scars of service with pride. The multilayer bulletproof windows were splitting at the edges, but luckily I was not going to be shot at, or so I hoped. I had a rendez-vous with Dieter, the intrepid photographer, at Solitude Castle, and was going to drive myself there in the “Factory Tank”, which is a good linguistic approximation of the meaning of “Werkspanzer”. Holding tight onto a paper map, I squeezed myself into the front compartment. Since the bulletproof partition prevents the driver’s seat from sliding back, it is obvious that German chancellors must have been driven by overgrown midgets with huge torsos and very short legs. No matter. Feeling exactly the same as I had felt on my many trips to Asia in Economy Class, I started the engine and drove off. The steering, normally quite light in a Pullman, was heavy, due to the extra mass pushing down on the front wheels.

The ride comfort, however, was incredible, even without the air suspension fully functional. But the best effect of all was the one the massive black car had on other drivers in their small cars in all the villages I had to pass on my way out of Stuttgart: some of them instinctively stopped, even though the light for them was a solid green. It was stunning, I had never before felt so much like an impostor. Not knowing the correct route, I meandered through some wrong turns (the turning circle is huge), until I found the series of tight corners leading uphill to Schloss Solitude, actually a part of the old Solitude Rennen temporary racetrack. The big Merc went around the hairpin with fantastic precision, albeit this was the most intimidating part of my drive. It felt good, however, to push 5.5 tons of German metal up that hill at a brisk pace.

Having arrived and letting Dieter do his magic I had more time to look over the car carefully. The driver had absolutely no comfort to speak of, and he could talk to his passengers via a special interphone. There was also a PA system necessary to talk to people outside the car (lowering windows in an armored car to talk to strangers is really stupid…), with loudspeakers concealed in the engine compartment and microphones in the outside rearview mirrors. Another very neat touch are the twin orange-colored lamps in the back. They were switched on to improve the looks of politicians whose pictures the paparazzi took through the green-tinted bulletproof glass: otherwise they would all look deathly pale. There is, of course, no navigation system. The German government simply employed intelligent people who knew where they were going.

Pity the car couldn’t talk, I am sure it had heard and seen a lot of political maneuvering over its three decades of faithful government service. Or perhaps it would not talk anyway, being a good honest German. The sense of history was pervasive. Sitting in the back I tried to imagine how a German leader, forced to live with the idea of a divided Germany, spied on by Markus Wolf’s Stasi, could feel while being driven to meet his Soviet Bloc counterparts. It must have been unimaginably hard. Driving back into Stuttgart I was in a somber mood. History produced this magnificent automobile, perhaps the best car in the world at the time, but it also produced pain and suffering. The sole Werkspanzer was a witness to much of it. And no, I did not try to drift it. I had too much respect for this amazing piece of history.

At the beginning of the 1950’s a “Big Mercedes” could not mean only a huge body and stellar performance, society expected more of the Mercedes brand. The engineering teams at Untertürkheim and Sindelfingen wanted to build a car able to do all that other cars could do, but much better, and also able to do things no other car could dream of. The wanted to build a luxury automobile able to pamper the passengers and simultaneously able to perform like a sports car when the need arose. They wanted to build a car that was easy to drive, and extremely safe as well as reliable (crash testing was performed at an old USAF airfield). They also wanted a never before attained level of operating comfort, but this proved to be a daunting task.

The electric motors available at the time to assist the occupants in, for instance, raising or lowering windows, were deemed completely unsuitable by Uhlenhaut’s wizards. What the pedantic Rudolf did was that he ordered his people to run a competition. Werner Breitschwerdt designed a complete electric assistance system, and Ernst Fiala a hydraulic one. Finally, the latter won, and here’s how Breitschwerdt explained why this was the case: “Numerous functions which we wanted to have on the car could not be done at the time with electrics. It was a problem of space and weight, as among other things we would need to have a second battery in the car. The high-pressure hydraulic system we developed had the advantage of having small parts that were sufficient for operation with its high pressure. The hydraulics were simply smaller, quieter and lighter than the electric systems available at the time.” Some parts were developed at Sindelfingen, as aviation components used originally were too heavy. What the “Komforthydraulik” system did or helped with makes very impressive reading: it could close doors (door closing aid like on modern Mercedes cars), operate the sunroof, operate windows and the partition on so equipped cars, it could operate the trunk lid, open and close the 20 flap valves inside the heating and ventilation system, adjust front and rear seats, adjust the damper settings and unlock the parking brake.

Uhlenhaut paid special attention to the unity of two opposites: ride comfort and sporty handling. Air suspension, combined with the front parallel wishbones and the rear swing axle with brake dive compensation (a mechanical device, so-called “Koppelachse”, also used on the W126), gave the car the handling prowess so enthusiastically described by the first journalists who drove it. Reinhard Seiffert described in 1965 in the „Motor Revue“ magazine his feelings about the ride comfort of the Big Mercedes: “The abused cliche of sticking to the road like glue is wholly appropriate here, as the behavior is fully neutral and stays so also while driving in corners at high speed up until the stage when the lateral adhesion in the rear is a bit less than in the front, but all that is needed to retain control of the car is to unwind the wonderfully light and sensitive steering a bit. That is well outside the norm for production cars. One can drive the 600 over mountain passes as if it were a sports car, and a well-driven sports car will find it difficult to follow.”

The braking system was also the focus of much attention from the engineers. The Big Merc had a dual circuit braking system with disc brakes front and rear, the front ones measuring 291 mm in diameter and gripped by twin calipers per wheel. The braking system was supposed to be really low-effort for the driver, and thus the air from the air suspension compressor (10 bar pressure) was used for brake assistance. A conventional vacuum booster would be too bulky, and it would only boost by a factor of 4, whilst the air booster gave a boost factor of 17. Special cross-ply 9.00 x 15 tires were developed for the Mercedes 600 by Fulda and Continental to match the suspension setup perfectly. Think the Pullman was an aerodynamic nightmare with the Cd of a barn door? Wrong. The angular 600 has a drag coefficient of only 0.458. In comparison, the 230 SL of the same era (with hardtop) comes in at 0.515, and the seemingly sleek 190 SL at 0.461. Surprised? The famous M100 engine was also installed in the contemporary S-Class, at first in the Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3 (W 108), with unaltered power output. In 1975 the 450 SEL 6.9 (W 116) was launched with an engine enlarged to 6.9 liters and equipped with dry-sump lubrication, developing 286 horsepower. This engine evolution was also tested in the Mercedes 600, a test vehicle is known to have existed, but it was decided to continue with the 6.3 liter unit until the end of production.

Two wheelbases were used throughout the production run, 3200 mm (Normal) and 3900 mm (Pullman), both cars featuring four doors. Later came the Landaulet and the 6-door Pullman. Two very special order Landaulets were built, one, already mentioned above, for Graf Berckheim, in SWB form, and for the Pope, full of special features, on the longer wheelbase. Two stunning coupes were also built and are now in private hands. 2,677 examples of all types of the Mercedes 600 were officially made, of which 2,190 were four-door saloons, 428 were Pullman limousines and 59 were landaulets. 44 armored units were made and one very special prototype “Pullman Werskpanzer” (or “W100 Sonderschutz Prototyp”), of which later.

Celebrity owners of the Big Benz include Elvis Presley, John Lennon, George Harrison, Jack Nicholson, Coco Chanel, Hugh Hefner, Ronnie Wood, Aristotle Onassis and Rowan Atkinson (Nicholson also famously drove a 600 in the amusing movie “The Witches of Eastwick”. The list of dictator owners is also impressive and includes Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. The Shah of Iran owned several and leaders of many democratic countries also ordered 600’s as their conveyances of choice.

Peter Schellhammer, who I had the pleasure of meeting a decade ago in Germany, was one of the 4 “Flying Doctors”, employed to keep Mercedes 600’s running around the world, including the Shah’s. He showed up at our meeting with his private handwritten notes from his time helping with 600 engineering, and then solving problems in different countries. Peter, whose English was careful and unaccented, was responsible for English-speaking customers, the other “Doctors” divided their responsibility according to the languages they spoke. Schellhammer and his colleagues taught service personnel in various countries when the first car was delivered, and customers were happy that this happened at the same time as the delivery. He remembers the hydraulic comfort system very fondly. The high-pressure system, running at 180 bar, used small valves and connectors. Bosch made the hydraulic precision switches. Screw-on connections were employed for the main hydraulic lines and plug-in connections for small volume lines. A drawback was the fact that when the hydraulics failed, they failed completely, therefore the “Flying Doctor” service was often needed at short notice. Peter told me that at the beginning the system used the Castrol Aero Hydraulic Oil, and if he arrived at some remote location he immediately would look for an aerodrome where he could source some hydraulic fluid to replace whatever had leaked out (the system capacity was around 2 liters only). The aviation fluid was safe to use, as its viscosity remained constant or nearly so in all temperatures.

Peter Schellhammer not only fixed cars, but he also demonstrated them to potential customers around the globe. Typically one would drive the customer over a bumpy railroad crossing at high speed to demonstrate the air suspension (chosen over hydropneumatic mostly for its low-speed ride comfort). The Shah of Iran was impressed, but he still told Peter: “The Rolls-Royce is the car for kings”. And Schellhammer, laughingly, commented, „You can’t argue with that”. Still, the Shah owned cars built by both brands. Safe is better than sorry.

The final word on how good these cars were in period should come from a very special luxury car test, run by the American magazine “Car and Driver” in 1965: “The Mercedes-Benz 600 proved to our complete satisfaction, that it is the best car in the world. A top executive at Cadillac paid it a light-hearted compliment when he said, “It’s probably the ultimate Cadillac,” and in many ways, he was dead right. The Mercedes is a complete luxury car, and it is far more American in concept than any previous European effort in this field. It has and will do, virtually everything one could ask of it. Its performance is superior to any other car in its class. Only the Cadillac can out-accelerate it. Only the Jaguar can go around a corner with it. Only the Rolls was able to approach its enormous stopping power. The Mercedes would probably have been able to win our six-way competition on the strength of its luxury alone, but it has married that luxury to a mechanical package of tremendous sophistication in the grand Mercedes tradition. Imagine if you can, a car with every luxury appointment known, a car that Stirling Moss can load with six full-grown adults and hurl around Brands Hatch within five seconds of the lap record for sedans, and you’ll be getting an idea of what we mean.” The comparison featured a 600 Mercedes, a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, a Lincoln Continental, a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, a Chrysler Imperial Le Baron and a Jaguar Mark X.

The story of the long black Mercedes which served dictators, tyrants, presidents and celebrities with equal efficiency for many decades started in 1955 when the design and engineering work began. The Sindelfingen team were told to do their best, cost no object, and to produce an automobile of unparalleled quality.

„Der Große Mercedes“ was the title of the sales catalog published at the launch of the car, and despite what some uneducated Internet savants might tell you, it simply means “The Big Mercedes”. The car was supposed to continue the prewar tradition of majestic state limousines. Short-term profit was not the objective, but rather the association of the Mercedes brand with heads of state and top-level politics. The W100, as it came to be called internally, did not replace any existing model, nor was it directly replaced when its production ceased in 1981. IT not only commanded respect from the common man, but it also facilitated East-West detente and helped people like Willy Brandt, Chancellor of Germany, to establish a cohesive coexistence policy with the Soviet Bloc.

Heinz-Ulrich Wieselmann, the editor-in-chief of the German “Auto Motor und Sport” magazine, a born Berliner known for his critical eye and his acerbic wit, chose to describe the car using the following words, “One approaches the big black automobile with apprehension. No question, a Mercedes-Benz commands respect. Well-fed, heavy and perfect in every detail it stands on its huge 9.00 x 15 tires. Its elegance forces one to pull one’s hands out of one’s pockets when it arrives. Quite simply, it is the most interesting, the most advanced and the best car ever produced.” Such expressions of euphoria were not often seen in Wieselmann’s writing, but the experienced high-speed driver did not stop there, “Talking about the driving behavior of the big Mercedes, with a decidedly sporting driving style applied to it, we can only describe it, emphatically, as excellent. Most sports car manufacturers would like their little squirts to handle curves so fast, with such safety and composure as this three-ton vehicle. The driving comfort is unparalleled.” Strong words from a man not given to undue praise.

The passenger car development department at Daimler was run at that time by none other but Rudolf Uhlenhaut. He set three targets for his team while working on the new top-class vehicle: the highest possible ride comfort for passengers, the highest possible safety and excellent performance. They were the same premises on which its prewar predecessors were built; due to who rode in them prior to WWII and later until 1945, those premises had been, well, conveniently forgotten. Uhlenhaut, however, remembered them well. Times had changed. Before the war, such vehicles were predominantly ordered by individuals who wanted themselves to be seen in public, hence open-top versions constituted 67% of all production. After the war, dictators started to value their personal safety more, and leaders of democratic countries had no desire to be seen as power-hungry, therefore the Landaulet body with its open rear, perfect for parades, was only ordered by 22% of all clients. Landaulets were built on the LWB chassis with the notable exception of one SWB example, built at the request of Graf Berckheim, and full convertibles were never built at all. In general, the SWB cars were to be self-driven, and the LWB ones driven by chauffeurs. The longer chassis was available with four or six doors, and the frame for all variants was so designed that without alterations it had the stiffness sufficient for all types of bodies.

On the 28th of August, ten prominent European car journalists met in Val de Poix in Belgium, invited by Arthur Keser, the head of the Mercedes press department. These were: Robert Braunschweig, Bernard Cahier, Piero Casucci, Paul Frère, Hermann Harster, Jacky Ickx, Harry Mundy, Hans Patleich, Heinz-Ulrich Wieselmann and Gordon Wilkins. Don’t be surprised if you recognize some names… The welcome committee from Daimler consisted of Fritz Nallinger (development boss; the same guy who thought up a Mercedes bomber plane during the war), Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Josef Müller, Karl Wilfert and the aforementioned Arthur Keser. Uhlenhaut, in his perfect British English, told the guests about the main tenets of the new vehicle concept and about its development which had lasted 8 years. The reaction of the small, select group of journalists, some of whom were fantastically talented racing drivers, was overwhelmingly positive. The Swiss Robert Braunschweig commented that he had never expected Mercedes-Benz to come up with just such a vehicle. And Harry Mundy, the Brit, reported that he had nagged at Rolls-Royce for years, begging them to modernize their cars. His warnings had been ignored and now Rolls-Royce was forced to realize that Mercedes had come up with a car that was far above the standard that Rollses represented at the time.

Halfway through 1955 Nallinger wrote a brief containing the parameters for a car based on the “C-type” chassis, thus explaining his ideas: “This platform will serve the future long-distance touring car and state limousine. It has a standard automatic gearbox, power-assisted steering, and power-assisted brakes. Normally it is a 6-seater. The design of the body frame is such that it can be lengthened to produce a vehicle with 3 rows of seats.” In February 1956 Nallinger voiced his visionary idea of an aluminum V8 engine with a capacity of 6 liters, but at the beginning of the R&D work on the new M100 engine, the capacity was actually 5 liters. The first fully functioning prototype of the new V8 motor ran on a dyno at the close of 1959. During the course of testing the capacity was enlarged in two stages, first to 5.8 and later to 6 liters, to be finally established at 6.33 liters and a power output of a relatively modest 250 horsepower. The increases in capacity and power output were necessitated by the parallel development of the frame and bodywork, where a constantly growing level of equipment meant more weight and the need for more thrust. The first three-engine prototype generations were made of aluminum with cast iron cylinder liners, but the block had to be made in cast iron too for the final iterations, as bore could not be increased in aluminum without sacrificing reliability. The planetary gear set of the 4-speed automatic transmission grew from 3 to 6 planetary gears due to the massive increase in torque. Interestingly, Nallinger was looking at another engine option back in 1956, namely a 7.5-liter V12. Technical drawings by Adolf Wente from 1957 prove that this was not just a pipe dream, but a sound concept which was being assessed. Nallinger used the 6.4 and 6.7 Cadillac and Chrysler engines as benchmarks.

The standard engine was incredibly smooth and powerful, at 100 kph (62 mph) it was turning over at 2400 rpm, and its rev limit was 4800 rpm. It drove the rear wheels via a newly developed 4-speed automatic, with a hydraulic fluid coupling instead of the expected torque converter (it was later also used on smaller cars). A fluid coupling offered no torque multiplication but with this engine this was not necessary, given over 500 Nm of torque available. The driveline efficiency was better with no-slip (98%) than with a converter. The engine had some unusual devices fitted to it which facilitated using the car in the circumstances for which it had been created. One was the hot starting aid, necessary as principals do not like to wait embarrassing minutes while their car refuses to start. Another was the high-speed idle switch (increasing it to 1200 rpm) for increased aircon efficiency when stationary; at normal idle, there was not enough coolant pressure at low rpm to operate the air conditioning unit at peak efficiency, and there were additional electric blowers on the condenser as well (the aircon unit was so good that the one in the Maybach 62 was benchmarked against it several decades later). The high speed idle would activate only with the gear selector lever in the P position, and the gearshift remained locked when the high-speed idle function was engaged. Even with the car at a standstill, the engine had to cope with a heavy load: it drove 7 auxiliaries via 7 belts. It took a whole day to replace all the belts.