The Carefree Joy Of Driving The Rustiest Road-Legal Mercedes CLK In Finland

We bought an ice track car last winter. It was a last-minute decision as the car we got a year earlier turned out to be no good anymore, meaning our group of friends needed a new one. Browsing the cheaper end of Finnish used car classifieds for anything rear wheel drive and road legal, we found this dodgy-looking and slightly expensive CLK, which was handily enough located somewhere one of the buddies could go see it on short notice.

The phone call from the car went like this: “Is it as bad as it looked?” “It’s worse.” “Does it run and drive?” “Sure, it’s pretty great in that respect.” “Do it!”

What we got for a grand and a half is an originally Luxembourg-registered 1998 CLK 320 with rust on every panel, including the plastic-looking trim on the A-pillars. A former garage loaner, it seems like it had been rear-ended and badly repaired at least once, sat for a while somewhere damp, before being badly welded and cobbled together again. The spare wheel well and rear quarter bottoms were just as rotten as the inner wheel arches behind the headlights. It had rattle can paint fixes and cigarette burns. One side was far worse than the other.

Importantly, however, it had a valid inspection (Finnish MOT) until Christmas 2025, meaning it was perfectly road legal in the eyes of the authorities. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how anybody could let it pass, especially with zero demerits on the sheet. Finnish road legality inspection is usually quite strict, as I’ve grown to know with my various beater cars.

We beat on it for a long weekend in the north of Finland at a disused airfield, where it proved its worth during long slides and effective maneuvers without too much cooling system trouble. We did have some of that, as temps rose and the car displayed a cooling fan warning, especially when it got stuck, with the engine bay packed full of snow. Eventually, we drove it home, a little worse for wear thanks to various snowbank hits, and I parked it in the barn for a few months, still covered in road salt and grime.

Actually Using the Rusty CLK as a Daily

It didn’t take me long to remember that sitting for an entire year between ice track events would do a car no good, and the roadworthiness would go to waste. I put the CLK’s battery on a trickle charger and bought a set of summer tires for it, as it only came with the winters it wore on rusty steelies.

Earlier, I had also stockpiled a set of very weird and rare Mercedes three-spoke alloy wheels from a junkyard, and realized these would be a perfect fit for the organic and rounded CLK coupe shape. I cranked the CLK to life, unstuck all the rusted brakes, marveled at the rust that somehow seemed so much worse than earlier, and started ziptieing the ruined bumpers back together. Since I also had no clue when the car had been serviced the last time, I changed the oil – all eight liters of it.

The Mercedes-Benz CLK: Coupe, Leicht, mit Korrosion?

The W208 CLK is a curious thing. It’s ostensibly a coupe version of the W210 E-Class, which is why it wears the front and rear design of those large sedans, but in a swoopy and soft ‘90s coupe package. And thanks to Mercedes’ cost-cutting, it is based on the smaller W202 C-Class, as the “C” in the name reveals. It superseded the C124 generation coupe, a paragon of over-engineering and solidity, but thanks to being made during the 1995-2005 New Malaise Era of Mercedes-Benz, the CLK rusted quickly and showed traits of de-contenting.

The design initially aged badly, but somehow I’m sensing a redemption arc for these funky ‘90s Mercs, probably partially because I’m also pushing for it to happen. Unlike newer cars, these were still available in weird and wonderful colors, especially if you had the budget for a Designo trim level that gave you green wood paneling and green leather if you so desired.

The drivetrains are usually pretty stout, even if the CLK didn’t get the venerable straight six engines the W202 got in its early days. The CLK 320 has a 218-horsepower M112 V6, and at launch it was the range-topper, before the V8-engined CLK 430 arrived. You could also get AMG versions, and in the lower end of the scale, M111 four-bangers and manual gearshifts.

Our purple CLK with its light grey interior and three-spoke wheels is some sort of Mercedes V6 Camaro. It makes these burbly, leaky noises, as well as a few rattles and whines. The 255,000-mile drivetrain feels good and doesn’t sweat or burn too much oil, and on a long summertime road trip east, the car managed a surprisingly good 31MPG.

At highway speeds, it cruises very smoothly, and none of the frameless window seals let in wind noise, and at times it feels like a solid, formerly expensive car. Then you get out of it and all the rust jumps at you. The corrosion even kept advancing at a frightful pace during this time, as the front fender bottoms just let go, their corners crumbled.

At Christmastime, I showed the car at the local inspection station with the idea they would fail it, but not ban it outright. This worked: I got a long advisory sheet, which came with a two-month grace period before the car would cease to be road legal. For us, that meant two more months of life.

The inspector remarked on the rust holes, and I told him the car was mint up until some salt trucks drove past me on the way to the inspection. He didn’t mention how I had reattached the muffler with a metal band through two rust holes, because somebody had beached the car in a snow bank last winter and ripped the original, now completely rotten bracket off.

Part of the charm of driving the CLK most likely comes from being the last owner or custodian of a car. You don’t really need to keep it up. If bits fall off, then they must. Rust has already won. I wasn’t keeping this car nice for anyone else, except my group of friends, who would pile it into the first snowbank they could find if given the keys.

Yes, It Died a Frozen Death

I actually wrote the largest part of this post before last weekend. The original ending went like this:

“But importantly, I just want to drive it, make the most of it as long as it starts and runs. Our previous ice track car was a W203 generation C-Class with the same plastic ignition key and ignition lock as the CLK. These have a habit of ceasing to function, as the electronic ignition lock and brain no longer recognizes the key and either refuses to start the engine or refuses to let the key turn.

Sure, you can replace the lock and key, but that costs about as much as you want to pay for a beater car in the first place, so it’s just easier to get another Mercedes that starts. We still have the W203 and it’s still in my name, but I don’t have much faith in us getting it going as it’s on the other side of the country, slowly languishing behind a barn. The CLK still starts most of the time, even if the key’s intermittently dicky on it as well. But when the M112 cranks to life with a healthy burble, it tells me it wants to live. Burn rubber. Do slides. Hit the rev limiter. Hit snowbanks. Live out the road legal life it has left.”

That would be a fine epitaph for the CLK, but the EIS ignition lock module likely failed its full and final time this past weekend in -13F weather. The car was successfully driven north for an ice track weekend, drifted for a bit on Friday evening, rescued from the snow bank once, driven again, and parked. The next morning, it wouldn’t crank despite usual attempts to give it more juice. A tow truck picked it up, and a garage read the error codes that pointed towards electrical maladies between the ECU and the ignition module.

At the time of writing, I feel a scrapyard ride is the economical thing to do, with another terminally rusty Mercedes safely taken off the road. Now, what should I get next winter?

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted

Top graphic image: Antti Kautonen