Friday, August 1, 2008

The Silver Arrows

Dating back automobile history, there was a story about the Mercedes Benz racing team held by Alfred Neubauer. Somehow a day before the race started, their car weighed 1 kilogram more than the racing limit. The team had an idea of scrapping the paint and exposing the raw shinny aluminum beneath. This story did not appear until Neubauer's biography in 1958.

The Mercedes Benz 300SL Gullwing
by Siku




Tagged as "the widowmaker" for many male drivers crashed and died with their 300SL.
This beautiful icon of an automobile was one of the first gasoline powered car that had a fuel injection made by Bosch Injection Pump.





At present, this car can reach a staggering $400,000 in the market as collectors wanted a part of automotive classic history.


The Mercedes Benz SLR by Siku




One of the best and fastest automatic transmission cars in the world today.
It was a joint project of Mercedes Benz and Mclaren Automotive. 0-60 mph
(100 km/h) time of 3.2 seconds, and a quarter-mile time of 10.1 seconds
at 143 mph (230 km/h).





some group pictures...







Although Siku made this two fine diecast with superb details, I just wish the size would have been a little smaller. Great cars indeed!

4 comments:

Christina G. said...

cool site, mikemeta, and I'm not even into diecast cars! Saw your msg. on Collette's Shoutbox, & wanted to let you know that you can get a lot of good Blogger and blogging help & info at BloggerTalk.net. (You mentioned RSS feeds?)

Also, you should already have a feed URL, add rss.xml to your regular URL (I think), and it wouldn't hurt to check into Feedburner.

JDMike's Diecast Site said...

thanks for the great info christina, will check it out later, and thanks for visiting the site also. :-)

Anonymous said...

Nice feature. If I may add, with their paintless racing cars, it was kind of strange that Silver became an accepted racing color for Germany. Auto Union (later Audi) and Porsche followed suit. VW isn't really involved in motor racing (apart from the occassional Paris-Dakar effort). From the Auto Union Type C (w/c was the W125's rival), to the present-day Audi R8s and R10s that has dominated Sports-Prototype racing this century, racing cars from Ingolstadt (sp?) use the silver color. Same thing with Porsche, from the type 804 Grand Prix car of 1962, to the type 550 Spyders and type 904s, all are silver. Of course when commercialism and advertising became the norm in motor racing, so went the national racing colors. So the Porsche 917s, 935s, 956s and so on carried their sponsors' colors. Only recently, during the past 10 years or so, did the nationalism in motor racing amongst car manufacturers came back.

Bitter rival BMW, to this day, still use the traditional White as Germany's national colors. Notice their Formula One and DTM efforts, as well as the LeMans effort of almost a decade ago, plus the Brabham-BMWs of the 1980s. Not to mention their Formula 2 effort (recall Dieter Quester) before that.

JDMike's Diecast Site said...

wow!! i would say thats a very detailed history about germany's automobile history, thanks jerome!

thanks also for the visit! :-)