They built the car for the tire.

Gummiwerke Fulda has made tires in Hesse since 1900 and has belonged to Goodyear since 1962. Preparing for its centenary, the company went through its own archive — and rediscovered something it had almost forgotten it had commissioned. In 1938 Fulda had gone to the Frankfurt coachbuilder Dörr & Schreck and asked for a car that could hold more than 200 km/h for long stretches, so that the company could test tires at speeds no ordinary vehicle could sustain.

Dörr & Schreck brought in Maybach Motorenbau for the chassis and the aerodynamicist Reinhard Freiherr Koenig-Fachsenfeld for the shape. The result, delivered in 1939, was the Maybach SW 38 Stromlinienwagen: a three-seater with a long tapering tail, enclosed rear wheels and a paneled underbody, whose drag coefficient of 0.25 was roughly a third of what its contemporaries managed. On its own chassis it was about 60 km/h faster than a conventional body. On 27 July 1939 its builders wrote that the car "lies well on the road and the streamlined shape already makes itself felt at 60 km/h."

Then the war came, the car disappeared, and it has never been seen since. It had barely done the job it was built for. That unfinished business is what the archive handed back to Fulda's board in 2000.

The connection to Stuttgart was made by René Staud, an automotive photographer with a foot in both camps, who put Fulda's managing director Bernd J. Hoffmann in a room with Leon Hustinx, Maybach's sales and marketing director. The partnership was sealed at the Frankfurt IAA in 2003. Hoffmann liked to state the arrangement as plainly as possible: other manufacturers develop a tire for a car; Fulda developed a car for the tire.

The brief was four lines long. Base it on a Maybach 57. Find around 700 PS. Reach 350 km/h. And get it through the TÜV, because a show car that cannot legally drive on a public road is no use to a marketing department. Twenty-five months later it was done.

The engine went to the specializts at Untertürkheim, who took Maybach's twin-turbo V12 out to 5.9 liters, fitted larger turbochargers, doubled the intake-cooling capacity with four intercoolers and cleaned up the airflow. It came off the bench with 700 PS and 1,020 Nm, then ran roughly a hundred hours non-stop — the equivalent of some 15,000 km of road use. Jürgen Weissinger, Maybach's head of development and the project's technical manager, noted the one advantage of working on a car this size: "We have the space in this car for a lot of coolers."

Aerodynamics came next, because at 350 km/h nothing else matters. Repeated wind-tunnel sessions produced a drag coefficient of 0.28 with mirrors and 0.26 without, on a frontal area of 2.55 m², and lift coefficients of 0.09 at the front axle and 0.1 at the rear — "absolutely nothing," as Weissinger put it. A three-part spoiler deploys from the trailing edge of the rear deck as speed rises. Even the final drive was sacrificed, shortened from 2.93 to 2.41 for no reason other than the top-speed figure.

A Maybach 57 shell came off the production line and went to Stola in Turin, who built the aluminum and carbon-fiber body over it. The cabin had to move rearward toward the rear axle to get the long-hood proportion, and that single styling decision cascaded through the whole car: a second bulkhead, a relocated steering column, relocated pedals and gearshift, a repositioned A-pillar and door, a moved fuel filler.

The wheels were their own engineering exercise. Ronal produced the show set by milling each rim from a 257 kg block of metal down to a finished 23 kg — and because the turbine pattern is directional, all four had to be made individually, two left-handed and two right. The rims that actually did the record run came from ATP-Excentric in Bremen, chosen because their cross-spoke design could be paneled over completely. On wheels this large, that was worth another three or four km/h.