The Queens of the Mille Miglia: Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR – The Unbeaten Record

Some cars build their legend across decades of competition; the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR needed only a single year – perhaps a single day. In 1955 it dominated the great international races, claimed the World Sportscar Championship, and set a record at the Mille Miglia that no one would ever beat. Stirling Moss, with journalist Denis Jenkinson beside him, covered the 1,597 kilometres from Brescia to Rome and back in just 10 hours, 7 minutes, and 48 seconds, at an extraordinary average of 157.65 km/h. An achievement almost beyond imagining on the roads and surfaces of the era, made possible by a car that represented the very furthest point of what automotive engineering could then offer.

To understand how such an extraordinary car came to exist, one must return to postwar Germany, a country driven at once by the desire to rise again – and this car remains its symbol. The recovery had begun in 1952 with the first appearance at Le Mans of the 300 SL W194, which also conquered the gruelling Carrera Panamericana. The mind behind the project – which encompassed the Formula 1 programme that brought Manuel Fangio his world title – was engineer and racing driver Rudolf Uhlenhaut. For the important World Sportscar Championship, contested with sports cars and perhaps even more commercially valuable than Formula 1, Uhlenhaut and his formidable team created the W 196 S, known as the 300 SLR. The name echoed that of the customer car, the celebrated 300 SL, but in substance it translated the full technical sophistication of Grand Prix racing onto the roads of the great long-distance events.