An SL Market Letter Subscriber brought this YouTube video to our attention today. This will help show how ahead of its time the 300SL Gullwing really was. It is a video from an organized hill climb run in 2012 at the Arosa Car Classic in which vintage cars race, one at a time, on the closed public roads between the towns of Langwies and Arosa, in Eastern Switzerland, not far from Davos. Click the video below, hold on and enjoy. See below for comments from John Olson regarding ‘zero run off’ driving events and different steering set ups found in 300SL Gullwings vs. the 300SL roadsters and how they affect competitive driving like this.
Olson Comments on this video: “This video shows the Coupe’s real personality beyond what most owners ever experience, with-or-without cliffs and stone walls nearby. This Swiss “drive in the country side” is especially hairy as there is ZERO run-off area at edges of the road. That, and crowd control, are the primary benefit of many (not all) purpose-designed private sport car tracks. During the early years of the Pebble Beach Concours those weekends included a similarly dangerous not-so-vintage race that cost a few lives and was ended. Apparently Europeans have not yet risen to the Wild West’s level of civilization.
The Swiss drive also dramatize the necessity(!) of the of the Coupe’s quick steering ratio: only two turns full-left to full-right. The GW’s propensity for sudden oversteer was never more evident (short of an accident) than observing this video. The GW needs that ratio! I discovered this when I switched from vintage racing a GW to a Roadster. I quickly put a GW steering box in my Roadster even though the single pivot rear axle was also more predicable and forgiving. The stock Roadster steering ratio is twenty percent slower… to accommodate its evolving client duty; touring and parking maneuvers.”
The driver of this car doesn’t seem to leave anything on the table during this run up a narrow road… rock walls to one side of him most of the time and perilous steep drop offs to the other. On several occasions you can see him on the limits of adhesion, sawing back and forth on the steering wheel to keep the car on the road.
Unfortunately, it is likely that we will see less and less of this sort of motorsport with 300SL participation as their prices continue to climb, we certainly don’t see much of this in the U.S. these days, although you can still usually see 300SLs at the Monterey Historics each year.