fleet of entrants in the German
Touring Car Series and a raft of rip-
snorting AMG high-performance
models, Mercedes-Benz enjoys a
solid sporting image. But through
15 November, the company's
museum in Stuttgart will revisit an
era when a series of space-age
wedges shook the company's
foundations.
Mercedes revealed the C 111 concept car
at the 1969 Frankfurt motor show,
backing its slippery, Bruno Sacco-penned
lines with sizzling orange paint
(officially, rosé wine), glass-fibre
bodywork, roof-hinged gullwing doors
and a 280-horsepower three-rotor
Wankel engine.
Rotary Wankel engines were then
thought to be the power plants of the
future, and Mercedes wanted a suitably
exotic test platform to study this new
engine. That car was quickly followed by
the C 111-II at the Geneva show of 1970,
an updated version propelled by an even
more extreme, 350hp four-rotor Wankel
that could fire the C 111-II to 100km/h
(62mph)in 4.8 seconds and on to a top
speed of 300km/h.
While the C 111's lines were a dramatic
rebuttal to the outgoing era of over-
stylised concepts and customs, its eye-
catching orange paint was customary for
Mercedes test cars of the time.
But times change, and the fuel-price
shocks of the'70s resulted in the C 111
being revised with a modified version of
a fuel-sipping five-cylinder turbodiesel
engine intended for Mercedes' sedate
sedans. The C 111-IID featured a 3-litre
diesel unit producing 190hp.
The C 111-III saw the orange test paint
replaced by the traditional hue of the
Mercedes Silver Arrow race cars, as the
intercooled 230hp turbodiesel car took
to the track at Nardo, Italy, to set world
speed records.
The final iteration, the C 111 IV, ushered
in the model's most radical performance
era. A true supercar, the IV was
equipped with twin vertical stabilizers
and a 500hp 4.8-litre gasoline V8, good
enough to help the car set a closed-
circuit speed record of 403.978 km/h in
1979, a decade after the first C 111's
debut.
And now, the C 111 family has been
recalled from the bowels of Mercedes'
storage centre, dusted off and brought
out for the public's enjoyment.
www.josiahdele.blogspot.com
Comments