40 replies to this topic

[Dennis David]

Just received a mint copy of Michael Riedner's book on the W196. 325 lovely pages on the last of the Silver Arrows. Full of great photographs, schematics, plans plus information on the car and it's drivers.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[luisfelipetrigo]

Are you telling us this so that we become envious??
or are you selling it !!!

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Saludos
Luis Felipe

[Dennis David]

No I never sell my books! ;-) But you may see some photographs posted.



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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/



[This message has been edited by Dennis David (edited 02-18-2000).]

[Ray Bell]

I sat in one of those once - didn't like the feet 3' apart driving position!
But a great car, all the same.

[Dennis David]

Ray my friend, that's because you needed "big balls" to drive that car! ;-)

Here's an early study for the monoposto version of the W196. Probably wouldn't have been a popular car in post-war Europe though.


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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[Ray Bell]

You certainly wouldn't rate that as the prettiest thing you ever saw....
What they did build was really quite nice, but with your legs so far apart your balls would bounce so much they'd be quite painful at the end of a race.

[Dennis David]

I hate when that happens! The book mentions the pedals being far apart. Maybe Karl can tell us why.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[Ray Bell]

It's because there's a great big clutch housing between them!

[Art]

This picture shows why this W196 and the open wheeler are my favorite GP Cars. They made the rest of the field look like stone age monsters. And under the bonnet they are just as wild.

Art NX3L

[Art]

For the benefit of the younger fans on the board. This car was built and raced 46 years ago. And it still looks modern today.

Art NX3L

[Tarnik]

Do most young people have no regard for history? Or do people just assume that we don't know? Anyways, the W196 was one of the greatest racing cars of all time, and quite good looking (once they tossed that tank-like design). Especially since it was driven by greats such as Fangio and Moss.

[Ray Bell]

Kling didn't do too badly, really, either.
And in the Sports Car there was that tremendous drive from Peter Collins.

[Eric McLoughlin]

I actually think the steamlimed W196's are much nicer looking than the more functional open wheeled versions. I was looking at a video documentary last night on Fangio and the sight of the two streamliners crossing the line in formation first and second at Rheims in 1954 (their debut GP) was beautiful. It's a pity Fangio didn't get on too well with the fully enclosed bodywork.

I've always found the upholstery in the W196 strangely fascinating - sort of "Laura Ashley meets NASA". Why did they choose tartan set coverings?

[This message has been edited by Eric McLoughlin (edited 02-19-2000).]

[desmo]

Dennis,

Thanks for posting the photo. That car is unbelievably sexy! Is mentioning the possibility of a return to envelope bodies on GP(F1) cars blasphemous here? I'm not sure, but in some ways they would be safer. That W196 is better than any argument I could make.

[Art]

Desmo.

The trouble with the streamlined bodies is the driver can't see the front wheels. They were always making a mess of the front ends. I can imagine a modern F1 car streamlined body fully enclosed cockpit ground effects and no wings. These babbys should fly and be absolutely beautiful. If they ever add 200 lbs to the weight of the cars it could happen. And now days they could eliminate ground effects on the straight aways.

Art NX3L

Art NX3L

[BRG]

I have heard this story many times but I could never understand why the Merc. drivers couldn't get on with the streamliner. After all it was not much different from other "proper" sports cars of the same era and drivers coped OK with them. And we are talking about Fangio and Moss, who were extremely good drivers with lots of enclosed body driving experience - so how come they couldn't judge where the front wheels were??

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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[FlagMan]

Art - I think they used to be called group C sports cars - until they started to get too popular with the manufacturers and Bernie had to kill them off!

[Art]

Flag Man.

It seems like Bernie kills every thing that is good. Can you imagine 20 LeMans Proto Types running on Saturday brfore the GP? They might out shine the F1 cars with the F1 drivers in them.

Art MX3L

[Ray Bell]

Roughly quoting Moss from "The Design And Behaviour of the Racing Car," the reasons had more to do with built in understeer. I've lost this book, but it could be informative on this subject if someone has it.

[Don Capps]

Doing this from memory so maybe Karl can correct me, but apparently there was a just enough "push" in the streamliner configuration to induce huge, serious amounts of understeer that made it an exciting vehicle in certain conditions - such as Silverstone. I can't remember exactly where I read this, but it stuck in my mind. Personally, as a kid, I thought the open-wheeled version of the W196 was hooah, but the streamliner was Most Hooah!

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Falcadore]

Art,
On the subject of bernie and killing things, I can remember when sports car racing in the late 80's was fairly strong but an FIA pushed change in engine regs saw the death of the world championship. And then the death of the ITC & DTM in the mid 90's from wildly escalating costs, the sports car revival of only two years ago has petered again.

And then the biggest crime of all, the very successfull World Touring Car Championship of 1987 killed, damn near deliberately, after a single year.

Just don't get me started on that one, the could fill quite a page.....

yours
Mark Jones

[Dennis David]

Another pic, this time Karl Kling - Reims 1954.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[Roger Clark]

Regarding Ray Bell's queabout "Design and Bahaviour of the Racing Car", Pomeroy does say that the W196 sufferred from understeer early in its life. this was deliberately built into the cars as the designers knew that a swing axle rear suspension tended to promote oversteer. I'm not sure whether this was made worse by the streamlined bodywork but Fangio did suffer similar problems at Monza in 1954 when they next ran the streamlined car. The open wheeler was OK on the Nurburgring so the understeer can't have been too bad then.

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[Ray Bell]

Moss also mentions that they built the cars in three wheelbases for tests at the Nurburgring - Moss and Fangio were fastest in the shortest ones, but rated them too hard to drive for the race distance. Lesser drivers were faster in the others....

[karlcars]

Silverstone in '54 was the only race (after Reims) in which the enclosed W196 was raced with no other choice being available; the open-wheeled bodies weren't ready yet. Later, M-B had the choice of both bodies and raced whichever they thought was appropriate. For Monza in both '54 and '55 they chose mainly closed cars. Of course the streamlined cars were used for the fast Berlin G.P. on the Avus. They practiced both types at Barcelona in '54 and chose to race the open-wheeled version.

The only race in which the streamlined cars looked awkward was Silverstone in '54, and there I think the main problem was the tire technology of Continental, which was way behind that of Pirelli, especially on a damp track -- as it was.

All that being said, the question of aero lift is an interesting one. At Monza in '55 they tried the cars with a number of aero mods including air brakes like those used at Le Mans. In those pre-downforce days their main emphasis was on drag reduction.

In '55 they did indeed have chassis available in three wheelbases. Streamliners with both medium and long wheelbases were taken to Monza. When they found the longer wheelbase to be faster they took Mossie's medium-length car back to Stuttgart and built him a long-wheelbase model in jig time! The decision was made after Thursday practice and the new car was at Monza by Saturday lunchtime!

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Karl Ludvigsen

[Dennis David]

They must have used their high-speed transporters;-)

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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[f li]

DD -

I remember something about Mercedes (they are truck makers, you know) using supercharged engines in their transporters. Correct me if I'm wrong about it.

[Dennis David]

The post was meant as a joke because the Mercedes transporters were in fact legendary. I'll post more later...

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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[Don Capps]

Boing! The light bulb went on when I saw what Karl had written. I was in error - the quote I saw said the problem was that bodies made the cars even more under-tired than they already were. As Karl mentioned, Continental was lagging way behind Pirelli at the time when it came to racing tires. On damp or oily tracks the Continentals were not that great. That made the understeer built into the cars turn the machines into a real challenge.

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Ray Bell]

The transporter was a legend itself. Karl may or may not verify that there was only one, but it had the full 300SLR kit in it, so it wasn't supercharged. It had a forward control cabin, was streamlined and specifically built for quick continental travel with a race car on the back.
It was such a legend that an Australian race car body builder actually built his own version, which was never really used. It had a TR3 engine on its side with a dry sump, a Holden utility cabin and a special alloy streamlined nose. The chassis was made up from two old Vanguard units. It lay around for many years at Amaroo Park, and I think it was finally discarded. Pity.

[PDA]

The difficult handling of the W196 streamliner was probably caused by the increased understeer caused by the design of the streamlined body. Conventional wisdom in car design at the time (including Chapman) was that powerful cars had to be designed with built in understeer, so that the drivers could attain the highest cornering speeds by causing a four wheel drift by judicious application of power to partially break away the rear tyres, so that they adopted a higher slip angle than the understeering fronts. This convention came in during the time of the MB/Auto Union battles of the late thirties, when they had 500 hp plus and vulcanised bannana skin tyres.

Streamliners were designed so that the centre of aerodynamic effort to side winds, moved back as speed increased (that is the reason for the fin on the back of the D type Jaguar) to increase stability. An undesirable side effect was to increase understeer.

Also as pointed out above, the designers were not thinking in terms of downforce, and they probably had lift problems at high speed. Even the Porsche 917 in 1968 suffered badly from rear end lift, as this aspect of aerodynamics was not well understood even that late.

The wide pedal placing was quite common in GP cars of that era, as the engine was placed as far back in the chassis as possible. This would no doubt have been exacerbated in the W196 becasue of the use of a straight 8 engine, compared with the 4s and 6s used by most of the competition.

[Dennis David]

Using an engine from a 300SL the Mercedes-Benz transporter could travel all day at speeds of greater than 100 mph fully loaded.



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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[Ray Bell]

T'would make a good service vehicle for the Mille Miglia...

[Barry Lake]

All this talk of Mercedes-Benz W196 reminded me that I once (mid-1980s) was taken to the Daimler-Benz Museum workshop.
There I too sat in a W196 and was surprised at the discomfort of the splayed-legs driving position - a bit like riding a very fat horse!
Those who have been to Daimler-Benz' museum in Stuttgart-Unterturkheim will have been stunned by the display of cars there. But the workshop is even more impressive.
There were so many GP cars (pre-war and post-war) stacked in there, so close together, I had to walk across the tops of the cars' tyres to get to the W196 (with the museum curator's permission, of course).
It was, after all, the top car in the year I first seriously followed GP racing.
Someone took a photo of me in the car and said "I will send you a copy" but they never did and I can't remember who it was.
There also was a row of several C111 record breakers with dust covers on them - more than I knew had ever been built.

[Roger Clark]

Chapman designed understeering cars until the Lotus 18when he realised that the very top drivers preferred a more responsive car. This may have been influenced by his own experience as a good, but not top-class driver, for whom understeer at the limit was much more manageable.

I have to disagree with you about the Jaguar tail fin. The fin on the D-type was there for good aerodynamic reasons as it increased stability at high speeds. You reaaly want a car which is very responsive at low speeds, and very stable at high speeds. THe arrival of wings in the late 60s achieved that; until then there was always a compromise.

THe high fin concept was also used by Connaught on their streamlined car and by Bristol on their 450 sports racer. The W196 didn't, but I think that the shape owed at least as much to the DAimler-Benz marketing department as to the wind-tunnel.

Originally posted by PDA:
The difficult handling of the W196 streamliner was probably caused by the increased understeer caused by the design of the streamlined body. Conventional wisdom in car design at the time (including Chapman) was that powerful cars had to be designed with built in understeer, so that the drivers could attain the highest cornering speeds by causing a four wheel drift by judicious application of power to partially break away the rear tyres, so that they adopted a higher slip angle than the understeering fronts. This convention came in during the time of the MB/Auto Union battles of the late thirties, when they had 500 hp plus and vulcanised bannana skin tyres.

Streamliners were designed so that the centre of aerodynamic effort to side winds, moved back as speed increased (that is the reason for the fin on the back of the D type Jaguar) to increase stability. An undesirable side effect was to increase understeer.

Also as pointed out above, the designers were not thinking in terms of downforce, and they probably had lift problems at high speed. Even the Porsche 917 in 1968 suffered badly from rear end lift, as this aspect of aerodynamics was not well understood even that late.

The wide pedal placing was quite common in GP cars of that era, as the engine was placed as far back in the chassis as possible. This would no doubt have been exacerbated in the W196 becasue of the use of a straight 8 engine, compared with the 4s and 6s used by most of the competition.

[buddyt]

The W196 was [is] timeless beauty

[f li]

Roger Clark,

???? didn't you rally a Cortina????

[PDA]

RC - I think you misread my post. I stated that the fin on the Jaguar was there to increase stability as speed increased by inducing aerodynamic understeer.

Personally, I think Chapman came to his senses with the 18 becasue he couldn;t believe that his "properly" designed cars were being run of the track by the "blacksmith" built Coopers which used the same engine. The Climax FPF was somewhat lacking in power compared with the Ferrari Dino, so couldn;t afford the power absorption of inbuilt understeer.

[Roger Clark]

PDA: Yes I did misread your post; sorry. And I agree wth what you say about the lotus 18

F Li: It wasn't me thsat rallied the Cortina, but I wish it was!
Roger

[Ray Bell]

What? You really needed to be peering in the dark at a 125E rod out the side of a mud-spattered block somewhere help wouldn't reach you for eight frozen hours?

[Tony Kaye]

Reference Mercedes W196 handling

While built-in understeer and primitive race tire technology by Continental may have contributed to the less than adequate handling of the Streamlined version, these factors would have also hampered the open-wheeled cars, which could hardly be called failures.

I suspect the reason for largely discarding the streamliners i.e. except at Monza and Avus, is a little deeper. When Mercedes returned to racing they arrived with the streamlined car. Absolutely no plans had been made for an open-wheeled version. (I suspect that they were heavily influenced by the success of the streamlined Veritas' and others in the post-war German F2 races.) If the cars had been ready for the start of the season they would have raced the streamliners in Argentina and Belgium before coming to Reims for the French Grand Prix. However, they weren't so their first race happened to be at Reims.

Now in one way this was very fortunate as the three long straights were ideally suited to the streamlined form. Added to that the day was hot and dry, so their inferior Continentals would not be shown up. And they won. My how they won. The others might as well have stayed at home. And they compounded it all with a side-by-side near dead heat.
Everyone drew the only conclusion possible, that the new Mercedes were head and shoulders above the competition. However, the suitability of the Reims obscuredthe shortcomings in the Mercedes.
When they came to Silverstone everything changed. Well, not everything, but some importantant things. First of course, Silverstione, though not today's Mickey Mouse track, was hardly an all-out Reims either. More importantly, it rained on race day. So the advantages of a streamlined body were nullified and Continental tires on an essentially understeering machine made those corners so tippy-toe, even for Fangio, let alone Herrmann ad Kling. So Gonzalez, Hawthorn and Moss were able to outrun the Mercedes.

Despite this, with the memory of Reims still fresh, no-one could believe the Mercedes were not streets better than the Ferraris and Maseratis, not least Mercedes themselves. So what did they do, they started to build open-wheel versions for the next race. This they thought would erase the major problem.

At the time it was said that the drivers, particularly Fangio, had complained about their inability to place the cars accuarately for the corners. Strange, because I have never heard of such a complaint at Silverstone in relation to D-Types, DB3S or any other fully-bodied sports car that ran there in the fifties.

Now I'm going to let you into a little secret, at least I've never seen this in print before. You will all have images of Fangio's car with its battered body panels from all those oil drums he hit due to the difficulty of 'judging the corners.' Well I was there that day, shivering in the rain at Club corner (where the Pressmen never go, especially on a rainy day). The inside of the corner was marked by a white line, inside which they placed the infamous oil drums to help the drivers. When Fangio hit the first drum, which went careening into the air, the marshal replaced it ON THE LINE, not behind it. Fangio hit it again. It was replaced on or even over the line. He hit it again. Thereafter Fangio had to drive differently, because he never quite new where the edge of the track would be. The open-wheeled drivers would have less of a problem and all of them were able to avoid the intrusive drums.

I've often wondered whether this was deliberate on the part of that marshal, after all Moss was running second until about lap 80 and could easily have won his first Grand Prix that day. Probably it was just carelessnass on his part - I hope so.

Mercedes won the rest of the races that season except for the Spanish Grand Prix. But their victories were not as easy as in 1955. The Italians gave them a pretty good run for their money in 1954.

And one can add another factor into the equation. In Fangio, Mercedes had one of the best two drivers of that time. The other, Ascari, was committed to Lancia, who were even later to appear than Mercedes. He flirted with Maserati on occasion with very little effect, but once the Lancia arrived in Spain it was at least the egual of Mercedes in performance. And the other Mercedes drivers made little impression in the races. It is arguable that without Fangio, in fact with Fangio driving a Maserati against them, Mercedes might have won only the French Grand Prix that year. And how we now rate the 1954 W196 if that had been the case?

So the conclusion after the Reims win that Mercedes were head and shoulders above the rest was WRONG. They were good, but not that good.

The conclusion that the main problem at Silverstone was the streamlined shell was also WRONG. It was a handicap on anything but flat-out circuits, but the car had other serious shortcomings as well.

By 1955, the car must have been technically transformed and the decision to make on Moss as team mate to Fangio was the ultimate death knell for the other teams.