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rare color footage of the 1930's mercedes race car. filmed in 1962, with graham hill commenting on hermann lang's (slow) lap in the legendary car.
ya sure, it was over 25 years old. it’s unreal that it took f1 till the 80s!
the last point you just mentioned is very interesting, i never thought of it this way! doing fast sophisticated cars because you are not able to do planes!
anyway, Germans do great cars in general, not sure if that’s related to the nazis.
yeah it was driven very slowly. you see the rev counter barely move. but it was already an old car in 1962. and there are only very few of these cars left. at their time, they were on a different planet, technology-wise, compared to the competition. even the gear lever knob was hollowed out to save weight. it took formula one until the 80ies to reach a comparable level of sophistication.
and lets not forget that the nazi regime was happy to finance those cars, because germany was not allowed to develop their own aircrafts after WW1. and there are quite a lot similiarities between plane and race car technology – even today.
amazing :) i like the car, it seems slow though, maybe it’s the camera
if you compare a 1930’s merc racer to one of those “kit-cars” used in formula 1 in the 70s, you would see a big difference in sophistication. in the 70s, you would basically get a ford DVF engine, slap it onto some chassis you welded in the garage and go racing.
what i find funny is that the auto union grand prix car of the 30s already had the mid-engine layout of todays race cars (engine right behind the driver), but it took the rest of the world until the mid 60s to adopt that concept (in the form of a cooper formula 2 car). after a year or two, front-engined cars were outdated (ferrari being one of the last ones jumping ship)
when mercedes started racing again in the fifties, initially they used the old pre-war cars and were still ahead of everyone else. until le mans 1955, when a mercedes car flew into the audience and killed 80 people on the spot. mercedes did not race again until they re-entered formula 1 in the late 1990s. in switzerland, circuit racing is still forbidden because of that accident.
and no, certainly the engineers, designers and builders of those cars would have been doing great without mr. hitler as well. most probably better. those were passionate and dedicated people, before, during and after the war.
well, i have to stop now :)