The Famous Mercedes-Benz Blue Wonder Racecar Carrier Is Even Weirder Up Close

I arrived in London this morning, exhausted and smelly and forced into a grotesque Ssangyong Rodius with the rough carelessness of someone who would drive a Ssangyong Rodius, which is, in this case, our poor unfortunate car-design curmudgeon, Adrian. Mere hours later, after I landed and endured the delightful indignity of the Odious Rodius, I was at the Goodwood Festival of Speed (again, not the amphetamine kind), walking around in the hot sun and looking at so so many cars.

I’m not going to lie to you – we’ve been through far too much together to do that – so I’m just going to tell you that I’m exhausted. But I want to be your eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and, yes, maybe bladder here at Goodwood, so I think you deserve to see something. And I think that something should be something kind of big and legendary, and I’m fortunate to say I have just the thing:

The Mercedes-Benz Blue Wonder.

Well, okay, fine, the official recreation of the Blue Wonder, also known as the 1955 Mercedes-Benz Rennabteilung truck. This is one of those vehicles that I feel like we’ve all seen in pictures in books and magazines and on websites countless times, so much so that it almost doesn’t quite feel real, like how I sort of imagine ancient Greeks thought about satyrs or something.

But it is real, an actual physical thing, and what I want to convey to you is what this thing feels like, up close and personal. And I can tell you that it’s deeply, wonderfully strange.

I think the first thing that strikes you is just how deeply peculiar the proportions are of this thing; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that much front overhang on any vehicle of any kind, anywhere. The cab section feels like a car with invisible front wheels, or some gravity-defying leaf springs up under there.

And then the middle section gets impossibly narrow, like a wasp’s waist, and of course there’s that incredible race car sitting atop it all, the W196 Silver Arrow streamliner, Mercedes-Benz’s revolutionary 1955 Formula One car.

But we’re here to talk about that hauler. What makes it all so incredible is that in many ways, this thing is really a significantly mutated 300S passenger car. The chassis started out as a 300S chassis, then the inline-six with mechanical fuel injection from the 300SL gullwing sports car was crammed in, and lots of the design of the truck was adapted from the 300SL, including borrowing the grille and a sort of adapted version of the rear end design.

I like that the funny little fender-top lights from the Mercedes-Benz W120 “ponton” made it onto the truck, too. It’s literally a huge, strange truck built on a very modified passenger car chassis with a sports car engine and styled with visual cues from a very, very different kind of car.

The more you look at it, the stranger it gets. Like the rear windows; I’ve never really noticed these in pictures, but holy crap are they surreal! It’s hard to wrap your brain around just what you’re looking at there, the shapes and contortions are so odd. I’m not sure why Mercedes decided to design it this way, which must have added considerable time and expense but boy, they sure as hell committed.

And that’s the thing about this whole truck – it’s genuine, wonderful madness. They had to leap through all manner of hoops to get this thing to work well as a truck – for example, in addition to the beefy power-assisted drum brakes, it has an exhaust brake, the sort of thing usually found in diesel engines, where the exhaust is severely restricted, forcing exhaust gases to have to be compressed as well as the usual fuel-air mixture, and significantly adding to engine braking.

Mercedes-Benz’s racing team wanted a fast way to get their car to and from the track, and they made this stunning 106 mph car-hauler to do the job. But, if you think about it, they could have just bought an airplane to fly the thing wherever they wanted at a lot less expense – both in money and time – than it took to design, engineer, and build this incredible, mad machine.

Mercedes-Benz built this because some engineers and designers wanted to, badly, delirious from an automotive high, a high that saturated the whole upper management of the company that somehow approved this bonkers project.

That’s how it feels to be up close to the Blue Wonder: you’re overwhelmed with the sheer improbable madness that this thing actually exists. A for-profit company decided this was a good use of time and resources, and that delights me.

There must have been some meeting where someone brought up the need for a fast way to transport their race car, and someone else in the conference room said “well, what if we make something, you know, absolutely batshit?” and then a few of them talked and some important person at the table said “yes, sure, let’s do the batshit thing,” and then they knocked off early and let the engineers and designers just go absosmurfly nuts.

I love this ridiculous thing, and I’m so happy I finally got to see it in person!

I gotta get some sleep. There’s so much more to see!