As a piece of automotive sculpture the 300SL is a masterpiece. With its"gullwing" doors and its own Teutonic treatment of hippy, organic contours it stands splendidly apart from all the clichés of postwar styling, including the much-plagiarized Italian school. The 300SL is a car that can take first place in a, then clobber all comers in a tough race.
Robert Leutge, an expert technician sent to the U.S. by the Mercedes factory to train agency mechanics. He tossed the door up, slid over to the passenger's side, and I entered.With the 300SL this is something of an art and it varies according to build, sex, and dress. For the first or fiftieth time it's a thrill. Actually, the car is not a handy package to climb in and out of but the mild gymnastics involved are a small price to pay for what you get.
The tricks of firing up a fuel-injection car are few and simple. For cold starts you pull out what corresponds to a choke and for hot starts you pull out a different button—that causes a whining, high-speed pump to go to work in the fuel tank. It not only purges vapor pockets from the fuel system when hot, but also makes available a two-gallon reserve fuel supply. The factory recommends that the extra pump be used continuously during high-speed operation.
Minimum muscular endowment is required for the comfortable operation of the 300SL. Caution and sound judgment, however, are essential to the continuing enjoyment of this or any other high-performance car and even a small error can have very discouraging consequences. For example, I had read in both a British and an American road test that the car should be pushed through turns under power, actually steered with the throttle.
With this one modification the car acquires an entirely new character. Now it peaks at 240 horsepower—a figure incidentally, which other road tests have mistakenly associated with the standard model— and it idles at 1100 revs. In the lower engine-speed range it is slightly rougher and it neither adds to nor subtracts from the vehicle's performance. It's in the higher rpm's that it makes another car of the 300SL.
One of its recent race wins was at Torrey Pines, with Bruce Kessler at the wheel. Other cars in the full entry list at Torrey could be heard for miles as they blasted around the course. The fact that the obviously competent 300SL ran a muffler and purred its way to the checkered flag without pyrotechnics impressed many spectators. M-B's West Coast sales manager tells me that during the week that followed, 11 300SL's were delivered to individuals who said they were sold at Torrey Pines.
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