The diamond
This story begins in 1931, when a young London-born engineer named Rudolf Uhlenhaut found employment at Mercedes directly after graduating. During his first years, he had to work his way up through the production of the series vehicles. It was only when the racing team ran into a crisis in 1936, after the Stuttgart team had dominated the races with the W25 in 1934/35, that his big chance came: ‘Rudi’ was promoted to head of the racing test department. He was to work under the head of the racing department, Dr Fritz Nallinger, and in collaboration with the racing manager Alfred Neubauer. Uhlenhaut was aware of how little he knew about racing cars, and threw himself into the task with his usual zeal, testing the cars himself at the Nürburgring. He became astonishingly fast at it, and occasionally even beat the team drivers’ lap times. He was also the only Daimler-Benz engineer to regularly travel with the racing team, and under his leadership important improvements were made to the 1937 car, the W 125. Uhlenhaut also worked on the programmes for the W154 and W165 before the outbreak of war in September 1939.
After World War II, Mercedes-Benz faced the daunting task of restarting production, contributing to the rebuilding of Germany, while also finding a profitable niche in the post-war economy. Like most European brands, the company started with inexpensive and efficient models that adopted pre-war design and were intended for the rank and file worker, while only gradually focusing on more luxurious offerings. With the introduction of the 300 S model in 1951, Mercedes made it clear that it wanted to resume production of luxury and sports cars, and it was no surprise that this also meant a return to motorsport. The company’s return to the racetrack began gently with a new sports car, the 300 SL, developed under the direction of Rudolf Uhlenhaut. In its earliest W194 incarnation, the 300 SL paved the way for the W198 gullwing models and roadsters.
The Formula One World Championship had taken place for the first time in 1950. But by 1952, the top motor racing category was in crisis, with hardly any teams left that were able to compete for the title. As a result, the FIA announced new regulations for 1954, which stipulated naturally aspirated engines with a displacement of 2.5 litres. The car had to have a single, central seat, but otherwise the regulations were rather unspecific. Fritz Nallinger and his colleagues at Mercedes-Benz saw this new formula as an opportunity to return to the company’s roots in Grand Prix racing, and with the efficiency for which the Stuttgart-based team was known, a plan was put into action to create the best possible car for the race. A new, well-staffed racing department was created, with the extensive Mercedes-Benz infrastructure and a decent budget at its disposal. Rudolf Uhlenhaut, head of the testing department, was the engineer in charge of overseeing the development of the new Grand Prix model. He started with a narrow-diameter tubular trellis frame, similar to the chassis of the W194 300 SL race car. This chassis, designated W196 R, featured independent front suspension via double wishbones, torsion bar springs and advanced hydraulic telescopic dampers. More significantly, the rear suspension featured a swing axle with a low pivot point, a design feature personally developed by Uhlenhaut that would later reappear in the production 300 SL Roadster. Massive Alfin drum brakes were fitted to slow the W196 R, and they were mounted internally to reduce unsprung mass.
Since the racing department had used both turbocharged inline eight-cylinder and V12 engines in the interwar period, it had several options at its disposal. Ultimately, they settled on an inline eight-cylinder engine with a displacement of 2494 cm3. Constructed around a complex Hirth roller bearing crankshaft, the engine essentially comprised two four-cylinder engines in synchronisation with two camshafts for each intake and exhaust. This gem was equipped with racing components such as dual ignition and dry sump lubrication, and featured a revolutionary desmodromic valve train in place of standard valve springs, as well as high-pressure Bosch direct injection that guaranteed reliable and consistent power delivery. The specially developed M196 engine initially produced a robust 257bhp, which was gradually increased to 290bhp over the course of two seasons. The engine was mounted low in the front of the car, tilted at 20 degrees to save space, and coupled to a rear-mounted five-speed gearbox operated by a single dry clutch. Unusually, the transmission featured synchronisers in the top four gears, while a limited-slip differential was fitted to help maintain traction. Fuel was provided by a special 178-litre tank with subdivided baffles to reduce sloshing.
Since the new formula placed so few restrictions on the bodywork, Nallinger and Uhlenhaut concluded that a streamlined aerodynamic body with closed wheels would be optimal for high-speed tracks, while a Grand Prix body with open wheels would be ideal for twistier tracks. The sleek and purposeful torpedo-shaped open-wheel body of the W196 R was designed with largely conventional lines for the time. The streamlined bodywork, on the other hand, was unique. The low and wide, gently curving body had minimal ornamentation and was characterised mainly by a wide open-mouthed radiator grille, cooling intakes on the rear shoulder humps and moulded character lines over the tops of the front wheel arches (a design feature that came to characterise the entire 300 SL model series and gave the brand’s sports cars a subtle sense of continuity). These streamlined bodies were produced in limited numbers by the racing department from the magnesium alloy Elektron, which made it possible to create an even lighter shell than aluminium and weighed just under 40 kilograms. The bodies with open wheels were also made of a light alloy, although body production was later switched to steel bodies built in Sindelfingen.
Alfred Neubauer, head of the Mercedes-Benz racing team for many years, was well aware that the success of the W196 R would depend on driving talent. It was therefore decided early on in the development phase to sign the best drivers available. While two German drivers were initially signed, veteran Karl Kling and up-and-comer Hans Herrmann, it wasn’t long before the third team member was in the spotlight: Argentinean racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio. Fangio was merely an up-and-coming talent on the verge of breaking through in early 1954. Fangio had undoubtedly already made a name for himself with his first drivers’ title for Alfa Romeo in 1951. But after the Alfa Romeo team disbanded in 1952, Ferrari dominated the next two years of competition. Fangio worked patiently with the Maserati team and in sports car racing. He notched repeated victories, but further championships eluded him, and by his early forties, racing fans sensed that Fangio’s best days were behind him. But Alfred Neubauer recalled Fangio’s remarkable performance in an Alfa Romeo at the 1951 Swiss Grand Prix – he took pole position, set the fastest lap and finished first. Neubauer approached Fangio’s agent and a contract was signed. But when the 1954 season began, the new vehicle from Stuttgart was not yet ready. This prompted Fangio to compete for Maserati in the first two races and quickly win the Grands Prix in Argentina and Belgium.
In July 1954, the new Mercedes-Benz race cars made their eagerly awaited debut at the French Grand Prix in Reims. With the introduction of a trio of W196 R streamliners, the appearance of which was awe-inspiring, as they looked different from anything that had ever been seen before in a Formula One race. Fangio, Kling and Herrmann qualified in 1st, 2nd and 7th places. Herrmann set the fastest lap of the race, while Fangio and Kling achieved an impressive one-two victory. The race was a resounding victory for Mercedes-Benz in its long-awaited return to racing. Fangio then qualified for the start from pole position at the British Grand Prix at the end of July, but only managed a fourth place in the rain. The team returned to form at the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring at the beginning of August with a team of four cars, consisting of three open racing cars and one streamlined car. The race marked the debut of the open-top version of the W196 R. Fangio secured pole position and went on to win the race, while Kling took fourth place in an open-top car. A team of three, all with open-top cars, achieved almost identical results at the Swiss Grand Prix three weeks later, with Fangio winning again and Herrmann taking third place. At the Italian Grand Prix at the Monza circuit in early September, Mercedes-Benz entered two streamlined cars and an open-wheel car, although tests suggested that the body with closed mudguards would be faster. In the race, a young British privateer driver named Stirling Moss, at the wheel of a Maserati 250F, led until late in the race before having to retire due to a ruptured oil tank. Fangio in a streamlined car and Herrmann in an open-wheeled car finished in 1st and 4th place respectively. At the Spanish Grand Prix at the end of October, the last race of the year, Fangio took third place among three open-wheeled starters. The legend of Juan Manuel Fangio had grown, and he won his second drivers’ world championship.
In the midst of this brutal demonstration of the W196 R’s dominance, the vehicle shown here, with the chassis number 00009/54, was completed. Originally completed as a monoposto with open wheels on the 2350-millimetre-long chassis with a long wheelbase from 1954 and given a 54 in the end of the chassis number (vehicles from 1955 have the ending 55), the car was first tested on 15 December 1954. For the 1955 season, the W196 R was further developed to remain as competitive as possible. The engine was improved, including the installation of a new intake manifold, and it was decided to use the Grand Prix bodies with open wheels in almost all races in 1955. The revised vehicles were about 70 kilograms lighter than their predecessors. Further tests showed that the Continental tyres could not exploit the full potential of the W196 R, so the tyre manufacturer was asked to supply a better product.
The racing department was once again on the lookout for a top driving talent and recruited the ambitious 25-year-old Briton Stirling Moss. Moss later wrote about the Mercedes-Benz team: ‘Their thoroughness and deliberation amazed me from the outset. It was as if you were in another world… Each race track was analysed mathematically… Neubauer himself marked and timed the gear changes, lap after lap… The drivers were listened to and respected, which is often not the case in other top teams… Nothing was too much trouble – and they were willing to try anything that could improve performance.’ However, it was Fangio who laid the foundation for success with a victory at the Argentine Grand Prix on 16 January 1955, the first race of the 1955 Formula 1 season. Since the next Formula 1 points event was not on the calendar until the end of May, the team stayed in Argentina to further test the car in a number of Formula Libre races. The Formula Libre Buenos Aires Grand Prix on 30 January 1955 was to be the first race for the car shown here with the chassis number 00009/54, driven by none other than Juan Manuel Fangio as car number 2. According to the available design documents from the racing department and information recently confirmed by Mercedes-Benz, the chassis with the number 00009/54 was equipped with a ‘Sport 59’ engine, apparently a code for the 3.0-litre M196 engine, and had a monoposto body with open wheels. One of the team’s main objectives in this non-Formula One race was apparently to test this new development of the M196 engine, which was intended for use in the upcoming W196 S sports car, the 300 SLR. Moss, Kling and Herrmann joined Fangio – each driving a car with open wheels.
The format of the Buenos Aires Grand Prix was a little unusual: two separate 30-lap heats, with the winner determined by the fastest overall time. While Fangio secured pole position in a rainy qualifying session, Moss took the lead in the first race. Fangio took the lead on the 13th lap and briefly held first place before being overtaken by Giuseppe Farina’s Ferrari 625. This order remained until the finish line, with Fangio 10.5 seconds behind. During the second race, many drivers changed cars, and Fangio initially led before being overtaken by Moss, who won the race by three seconds in a thrilling finish. Although Fangio ‘only’ came in second in both races, his total time of 2:23:18.9 was the lowest, beating Moss by 11.9 seconds, the 625 Ferrari by more than half a minute, and Kling by almost a minute. This secured a victory for the racing department in this important first outing for chassis number 00009/54. In June, Fangio and Moss took first and second places at the Belgian Grand Prix and the Dutch Grand Prix, before a series of Grands Prix were cancelled in response to the Le Mans disaster. When racing resumed at the British Grand Prix at Aintree in mid-July, the Mercedes-Benz team dominated once again, with experienced local driver Moss leading a quartet of cars to a commanding 1-2-3-4 result (Moss-Fangio-Kling-Taruffi), the only quadruple victory in the brand’s history. This set the stage for the last race of the season – and for the last race outing of 00009/54: the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September.
In 1955, the Monza circuit was rebuilt with a new high-speed curve that has since become legendary in motorsport. As a result of this development, the racing department already knew that the track would favour a streamlined body, although up to that point in the 1955 season they had only used the open-top body. During testing at Monza in August, the team experimented with a new protruding front end for the streamlined car, but the results were inconclusive. Ultimately, the mid-wheelbase chassis was chosen to be fitted with a new, length-adjusted streamliner body in the original style, except for a new air intake next to the bonnet to provide the inclined engine with more breath. Two such cars were built in Untertürkheim. During training for the race a month later, the mid-wheelbase streamliner proved to be unstable at high speeds. Fangio then used a replacement streamliner built on an original 1954 long-wheelbase chassis, and Moss quickly requested an identical car, so Neubauer contacted the workshop and ordered the fastest possible delivery to Monza. A replacement long-wheelbase chassis, numbered 00009/54, was fitted with a streamlined body and sent immediately to Monza.
Mercedes-Benz sent eight cars, almost all of them W196 R’s, to the race that would become the model’s swansong in racing. Of the eight cars, Mercedes-Benz entered four for the race, with Fangio and Moss competing in W196 R Streamliners and Kling and Piero Taruffi in W196 R Monopostos with open wheels. Fangio secured pole position, while Moss took second place on the grid, just three-tenths of a second behind Fangio. Kling qualified third and Taruffi ninth; the advantage of the Streamliner body on the fast Monza track was obvious. From the start, Fangio and Moss held their starting positions of 1st and 2nd. On the ninth lap of the race, Moss took the lead from Fangio, but only for a short time; Fangio countered and held the first position for the rest of the race. Moss managed to hold on to second place until the 18th lap, but then had to come into the pits to replace the windscreen, which dropped him back to eighth place – and then had to retire after 27 laps due to a defective piston in the fifth cylinder. Although Moss only completed a little more than half of the race, he managed to achieve the fastest lap of the race with an impressive time of 2:46.900 with chassis number 00009/54. This meant an average speed of 215.7 km/h – and earned him one point towards the Formula One drivers‘ championship. At the end of the 1955 Formula One season, Fangio won his second consecutive drivers’ championship, while Moss finished in second place, thereby sealing the legend of the W196 R. Moss had since taken the 300 SLR to two World Sportscar Championship victories, including his legendary victory in the 1955 Mille Miglia in car number 722 with co-driver Denis Jenkinson. This was enough to narrowly beat Ferrari to the World Sportscar Racing Championship. Significantly, the 300 SLR, internally designated as the W196 S, was the two-seater sports car version of the W196 R; the 300 SLR benefited from the larger 3.0-litre engine, as had proved so successful in Buenos Aires with chassis number 00009/54. The W196 R’s record of success was now unassailable. In two seasons, the model had won three championships in two different racing series. In 12 Formula One races, the W 196 R had won nine times in commanding style and won two further races without scoring points, which corresponds to a total of 11 wins from 14 starts.
After Mercedes-Benz had proved that it could dominate on the race track, the company withdrew from motorsport again after 1955 and said goodbye for the next few decades – thus ensuring that the remarkable legend of the W196 R was never forgotten. At the end of 1955, ten different complete W196 R models were still in running order, including four with streamlined bodies. A total of fourteen chassis were built, designated as numbers 1 to 15. (Chassis numbers 1 and 15 were eventually scrapped, and number 11 was never assigned to a chassis.) In October 1955, Mercedes-Benz held an official ceremony to retire the W 196. The cars were publicly covered in tarpaulins before being taken to the company’s museum in Stuttgart. While the Daimler-Benz Museum initially kept all 10 remaining W196 R cars, four of them were eventually donated to prestigious museums around the world, including chassis number 00009/54.
The journey of chassis number 00009/54 after the race began in September 1964, when a delegation from the Mercedes-Benz Club of America visited the brand’s Untertürkheim plant in Stuttgart. As revealed in a trove of correspondence, a conversation took place during that visit between Wilhelm ‘Bill’ Spoerle of the club and Dr.-Ing. Friedrich Schildberger of the manufacturer about donating a race car for the ‘planned new museum on the grounds of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.’ Wilhelm ‘Bill’ Spoerle, a German immigrant who had worked in the motorcycle racing division of NSU before the war, had moved to Indianapolis in 1956 to work on race cars, holding a position at the upstart Dreyer Motorsports for several years. In 1963, Spoerle was headhunted by Anton ‘Tony’ Hulman Jr. and became director of restoration at the relatively new museum at the Brickyard. When Spoerle visited Untertürkheim, he was already working for Tony Hulman and it was surely clear to him that there could be no better place for a donation of the W196 than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.
As Mercedes-Benz president Walter Hitzinger and chief engineer Dr Nallinger explained in a letter to Hulman in March 1965: ‘In view of the special significance of Indianapolis in the history of automobile racing and particularly the contribution of our company, we have now decided to present you with a 2.5-litre, W196, 1954 model, streamlined car as a gift for the exhibition in your museum.’ Mercedes-Benz had a connection to America’s greatest race because the company won the race in 1915 when Ralph DePalma drove a Mercedes to victory in its fifth attempt. Dr Schildberger set about getting the W 196 R back into working order so that it could be driven at an official presentation at the Brickyard, scheduled for the weekend of the 1965 Indianapolis 500. For this exhibition, Mercedes-Benz ordered the delivery of 50 gallons of racing fuel from Esso (Exxon). The streamlined car was shipped via the port of Baltimore at the end of April and transported by truck to Indianapolis. The Mercedes-Benz was officially donated to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Foundation on Sunday, 30 May 1965, and made two appearances that weekend. The first time at an informal presentation after the annual drivers’ meeting, where the car was demonstrated by Peter DePaolo in honour of the Mercedes victory 50 years ago by his uncle Ralph DePalma. The following day, DePaolo was back behind the wheel before the main race on Monday, after the car was officially handed over by Mercedes-Benz to the IMS Museum. The W196 R has been carefully stored and maintained by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum for almost six decades, and on 1 February 2025, the vehicle will be auctioned by RM Sotheby’s. More than $50 million is expected.
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