M194

Daimler-Benz resolved in 1951 to go racing again without designing a racing car from nothing. The 300 SL took the drivetrain of the 300 saloon nearly intact: the same three-liter six, the same robust and very heavy four-speed gearbox, the same steel axles. Since none of that could be lightened, everything else had to be. Rudolf Uhlenhaut revived an old idea for a triangulated tube frame and his engineers turned it into a 50 kg spaceframe. To let the nose drop, the engine was canted 50° to the left and half laid over; three Solex twin-choke carburetors, dry-sump lubrication and a harder state of tune lifted it from 115 PS to 170.

The result weighed 1,100 kg where the 300 S weighed 1,780, and the 1952 season went better than Untertürkheim had dared expect: second and fourth on the Mille Miglia, a clean sweep at the Preis von Bern, a one-two at Le Mans at a record 155.575 km/h, another one-two-three at the Eifelrennen, and victory in the Carrera Panamericana. For 1953 new Weber carburetors and a bigger-port head found 201 PS, but synchronising three carburetors was fiddly and the engineers wanted reliability instead. Direct injection, drawn from Daimler-Benz’s DB 601 aero-engine work, was the answer — and with an aluminum block the engine became the M 198 of the production 300 SL.