I think the biggest shock was its size. Parked there on the Brooklands banking it looked tiny. When I think of pre-war Mercedes-Benz racing cars, I think either of massive leviathans that needed Geoff Capes-levels of upper body strength to wrestle around, or implausibly terrifying Grand Prix machinery with the kind of power that would not revisit the top level of motor racing until the 1980s turbo era. But it is neither of these things. And something else it isn’t either: a Mercedes-Benz.
I may be driving it on the test track at MB World, it may have a three-pointed star on its nose and cam covers (note the plural – we’ll be getting to that), but this is no Benz. It is, instead, just a plain old Mercedes that raced exactly 100 years ago, and therefore two years before those hitherto deadly rivals Daimler – which owned the Mercedes brand – and Benz merged to create Daimler Benz, and agreed thereafter also to merge their logos and affix them to cars that would forever after be known as Mercedes-Benz. So if you ever wondered where those laurel leaves came from, now you know.
Another strange thing about this car’s name: it doesn’t really have one. When I asked the brilliant folk from Mercedes-Benz Classic who have painstakingly restored one of two (out of a total build of four) that have survived what it is called, they say it is the ‘Mercedes Targa Florio’. But when I point out that name could only have come about retrospectively after the event that made it famous and enquire what it was called prior to that, I draw a blank. ‘Mercedes 2-litre’ is all there is.
