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!
I’m glad it’s not the 300SLR on the truck. 1955 was a bad year for MB.
I don’t think there was any commercial airplane capable in 1955.
DC-3?
That is just one of so many interesting things at Goodwood this year. I’m here for all 4 days and I feel like I am running out of film in my iPhone… haha ….you are going to have a year’s worth of stories from this event.
Pretty sure they design the rear of the cab shape to the shape of the trailer so it has the best turn ratio. It seems clear to me.
They could have just made it flat in that case, then it won’t hit anything in the bed. Having it protrude out more at the top would only help the driver and passenger if they had Xenomorph heads… I think its some kind of 1950s space-age aerodynamics, trying to meld the shape of the cab to the nose of the race car.
I may be looking at it wrong but if you realize it is a specific vehicle carrier. Look at the pictures it is a flat front car but butting out only at the same place where the cab and window are bowed in. So turning with the tight design would cause the cars corners to hit the back of the cab. But with the back window shaped as it is the corners would miss the back of the cab. Now this is based on the pictures posted and they aren’t perfect
There is no trailer. That’s the front axle behind the cab.
Could the rear windows (I think there are 2) be windows from something else MB made, a truck or something, but flipped upside down?
Definitely not. There was no remotely similar window in all of Mercedes-Benz‘ vehicle program.
Hey, if you’ll be my bladder and liver, I can drink all the beer I want!
I, like I’m sure several of us here, have a diecast of this hauler right next to my computer monitor. And I too never noticed those rear windows. That is completely bonkers! I love it even more now.
I only have the Hot Wheels version, and at 1/64 scale, those windows are hard to notice (they’re colored too).
Mine is also a 1:64, but it’s a Norev so it’s a little nicer/better detailed. I still never noticed the back of the cab/window details until this article.
Great, now I’ve been inspired to go and spent money on yet another desk toy. Well it can keep the BMW 2002 Hot Wheels company.
I love the Blue Wonder, I have a Hot Wheels version of it carrying a gullwing on my desk at home. It would be so cool to see this!
What a hauler! Those rear cab windows are something. It’s as if Mercedes took a look at the compound-curved glass windshields coming out of Detroit at the time and said “Hold my Dunkel”.
Hold my Dark? Nah… The Germans more likely would say “Halte mein Bier”
I just hope there was a large stein involved.
It is just F’ing glorious!!! I’d daily the hell out of it
The blue one has an even worse design than a SsangYong Rodius!
But it is as ridiculous as the old Renault cab forward sedan prototype, so that is one reason to like it 😀
The back window looks like someone went crazy with the Photoshop distort tool.
For me, this truck is pretty much a distillation of German car and industrial design in the 1950s. It has more than a touch of that Schuco Toy look so popular back then.
I would guess this was the inspiration for Bill Thomas’s race-car hauler built some years later, which too a lot of production-line Chevy bits and laid them on a vehicle of roughly the same proportions.
The most striking thing to me is how much great engineering and design they had in 1955 and now their cars look like nightclub crap inside and out.
It looks like they took two back windows and flipped them upside down for the cab back window?
I feel like the Aughts was their last gasp before they became the nonsense they are now.
So I just mentally exist in the 80s Mercedes days and cruise around in my w126.
If Mercedes ever built more 300SLR “Uhlenhaut” coupes, I’d turn bank-robber to be able to afford one.
Good call
Yeah, I was thinking the same with the back window – that’s definitely some pre-existing glass they cribbed for the design. Whole thing’s a glorious hodge-podge of Mercedes parts, somewhere in the world of 1955 Mercedes cars or trucks is the source for that glass.
Negative. There was no piece of glass on any Mercedes production vehicle anywhere near that shape.
Cheers from the outskirts of Stuttgart 🙂
Ok, then yes, it’s even weirder that they custom-made that glass ???? I’m impressed by the engineers who put this together, but I’m really impressed by whoever managed to sell it to leadership and accounting!
The 1955 season got off to a great start for Mercedes-Benz, and by the end of spring it was all over.
This is one of the sweetest trucks ever created.
The looks are instantly recognizable, yet nuts.
Mercedes truck, as inspired by Salvador Dali.
Thanks for enduring that exhausting trip and resisting the jet-lag long enough to bring us this report on a remarkable machine! We don’t deserve you Torch!
Judging from the last photo it looks like the rear window was designed that way to give the front of the race car a few more crucial inches of space if necessary.
Also allows a little extra space if someone needed to get under the front of the car when it’s loaded up.
You’re looking at it the wrong way round. It’s a car transporter, obviously it needs space for the car it’s transporting.
What is that weird pointy volume of space in the cab for?
It’s above the seat backs and has glass sides and back, so it can’t be for cargo.
Fractionally better aero when unladen? It’s never unladen, it has to take the race car back from the track too. Plus a simple extended roof would do that for a tiny fraction of the effort and cost.
Even if the crazy glass is from something else it makes no sense at all to put it there like that.
Maybe it’s that shape to eliminate (or at least mitigate) a blind spot when turning or backing that monstrosity? It sure doesn’t look like something you’d do unless you felt like you had to.
We love you, Jason.
Oh lord would you look at this Mercedes Benz
It ain’t got no body, just two distant ends
Up top there’s a race car and the spine where it depends
How this truck got built I can’t comprehend
Sigh. Where’s my Southern Comfort?
I had to look up “Rennabteilung”, because Ich shreche kein Deutche, and it just means “Racing Department” or “Racing Division”.
It would be interesting to see the bottom side of it. It’s gloriously weird and strangely proportioned – why would they do that??!!
Meine Duetch ist sheisse.
Mein Prasident ist Sheisse.
Oh wow, we have something in common! How improbable!
I’ve seen it at the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart. Delightfully wacky! Who says Germans lack a sense of humor?
Goodwood is a bucket list thing for me – I am very jealous! I’d definitely ride in that eyesore to get there.
Amazing! Astounding! Splendiferous! You escaped the Bermuda Triangle! Was there a time tunnel involved? I tend to credit some exuberant panel beaters, highly skilled at their craft, than some boardroom dwellers.
I’m convinced that all of that Bermuda Triangle shit in the 70s was just to sell more issues of “Fate” magazine.
It turns out the Bermuda Triangle has the most lost ships because it’s one of the busiest shipping areas in the world, so a whole lot of ships spend a whole lot of time passing through there. That’s it. That’s the reason. It’s just one of the most common places for ships to be, so when a ship is about to sink, there’s a high likelihood that it’ll be in the Bermuda Triangle when it does. Has nothing to do with the area being abnormally dangerous, it’s just like more people dying in the city than in the countryside because there are more people in the city than in the countryside, not because the city is inherently more dangerous in any way.
It’s always funny when somebody tells you “be careful!” when you’re heading to New York, and they’re telling you that from someplace far more dangerous than New York.
Well aren’t you the sodden quilt. An interesting, somewhat plausible bit of tid from Spock’s In Search of,(probably), fissures in the ocean floor emitting a column of gas. No matter the buoyancy of a ship, it will drop like a rock if caught in such a column.
I still think ships being statistically more likely to be in the Bermuda Triangle than elsewhere at any given moment is a more likely explanation for why a lot of ships sink in the Bermuda Triangle, but I will accept “Giant ocean farts delete buoyancy” as another hypothetical reason.
The ocean can have its own “silent but deadly” moments…
This kind of selective madness is why I’ve always been a Ford fan – the GT program of the 60s, now known to everyone thanks to the movie, was, on the face of it, such a bonkers waste of company resources. Though he’s usually portrayed as the bad guy, beancounter Leo Bebe wasn’t wrong about that. But that Ford went ahead and did it anyway, and the rest is glorious automotive history.
But really, how does this story NOT start with a picture of the diabolically welcoming driver at the airport, sporting no doubt the world’s most sardonic smile? And maybe an anachronistic cap.
Henry Ford II tried to build the best car in the world, and the Continental II was a very good car but it lost a vast amount of money. Henry decided to build the car of the future and name it after his dad, Edsel. Nice car, but the marketing failed, spectacularly. (Note that cars of the future never seem to do well; see also Airflow and Tucker). So then Henry tried to buy Ferrari, and that went sideways. Fortunately, Robert McNamara was good at making money, so there was some left to go racing, Eric Broadley had a car, and Henry needed a win.
I can’t help but imagine a dude like yourself getting these marching orders after said meeting, heading off to the local taillight bar, grabbing some chalk, and spending the rest of the evening at the chalkboard drinking delicious beer and eating schnitzel and pretzels. That must have been a fun night.
Speaking of the taillight bar, I’m kind of dissapointed there hasn’t been an word about the gloriousness of the Alpine hypercar taillights at LeMans. Yeah, yeah, yeah he was busy with the whole doing a cannonball in a taxi, trip to Bermuda, etc. But I’d love to know the chatter there, especially from the Amber’s.
More likely, Rudolf Uhlenhaut told some engineer exactly what he wanted, where he could find the parts, and that it needed to be ready in two weeks.
Land, find tall guy w hideous car, drive to see gorgeous car hauler, write article, complain about needing to crash, go to Wetherspoon and have a pint or three whilst people watching (with mandatory halloumi with that first pint), then crash.
Maybe don’t use ‘crash’ in the airport?
Is that a crash helmet? Oh, I hope not!