Photos were taken, polite conversation was made, delicious toffee was purchased and eaten. The Nucla Mustangs football team wore their football jerseys (“Beat Telluride!”). The local school let all the kids out to see the cars. It seemed the whole town turned out to see the show. Our first stop was in Nucla, a small town of just over 700, where all the cars from the Grand parked on the main street and down the middle turn lane. The sun was shining, the weather was perfect, and the ancient straight-six roared happily. There were long stretches through red rock canyons, high-speed bombing runs across empty high plains, and slower jaunts through high-country splendor with autumn leaves just starting to fire. Off we set to take a 256-mile loop around southwestern Colorado: Telluride to Nucla (yes, Nucla) to Cortez, over Lizard Head Pass, and back to Telluride.
Road runner looney tunes driver#
Plus, the steering wheel is bigger than what a modern driver is used to. A couple weird things about this specific model: The seat-bottom cushions were a little too high, so we took them out and Mike layered a padded moving blanket across both of them, and the recirculating ball steering was going to be rebuilt after our drive and so was a little imprecise on-center. The clutch works just fine with a perfect weight to it, the shifter gets into and out of the gears with no fuss or double-clutching required, and the vision all around is almost unsurpassed, especially as we had it, with the top down all day. The 300 SL is, in almost all parameters, a modern car to drive. Easy solution to that: Keep it above 2500 rpm! This particular 1958 300 SL Roadster was having a slight problem with its fuel injection, hesitating below 2500 rpm. So with that, I met Mike in the parking area of the The Peaks Resort and Spa in Mountain Village outside Telluride and eyeballed our silver SL. In the 40 years, 45 years, I’ve been working on them I’ve never seen one that had major damage. They’re just very well-done, beautiful cars. But 300 SLs, there’s just not a bad angle on them. Most cars, I think something happens as time goes on and they fall out of fashion. “It’s one of the few cars that, the design of both of the Gullwing and the Roadster are pretty great. “They’re great cars,” said Scott Grundfor, who has been restoring Gullwings and SLs for over 40 years at Scott Grundfor Co.
Griff Borgeson wrote in the April 1956 issue of Sports Car Illustrated: “After exhaustive road testing of a standard 300 SL, after driving impressions in a race-tuned version and interviews with several owners and specialist technicians, I’m ready to haul off and make a flat, unequivocal statement: This is the finest production sports car in the world. Depending on what model and what year you got, you could get an aluminum hood, roof, and deck lid, as well as disc brakes, features usually only found on race cars of the time. Mercedes’ ad slogan when it came out was, “Only Flying Is Better.” It might have even been better than flying. Depending on what final drive you chose, top speed was as high as 163 mph. Curb weights varied from 2855 to 3131 pounds, and 0-60 mph was listed from 7.7 to 9.3 seconds, slow by today’s standards but pretty quick for the 1950s.
Road runner looney tunes manual#
That was mated to a four-speed manual transmission. Power came from a 3.0-liter OHC straight-six making either 220 hp or 240 hp (depending on your source) and 294 lb-ft of torque via the first use of mechanical fuel injection in a production car. They were based around a chromoly tubular space frame, with independent suspension including a swing axle at the rear. If you were cool in the 1950s and liked to drive fast cars, you had a Mercedes 300 SL. Fangio had one, Picasso had one, Lance Reventlow, Clark Gable, Briggs Cunningham, Yul Brynner, and Frank Lloyd Wright all had 300 SLs. It’s hard to overstate just how cool these cars were. On all critical counts, it scores.”įrom the W194 came the 300 SL Gullwing from 1954 to 1957, and then the 300 SL Roadster from 1957 to 1963.
“This is the finest production sports car in the world.
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