We’re motoring top-down through the Rockies on a late summer afternoon, our 100 plus car entourage trailing a ribbon of glittering sheetmetal and sonorous exhaust notes through a picture-perfect landscape. While these mountainous backroads are a common destination for roadtrippers, this is far from the average car club drive or classic cruise. This is the Colorado Grand, the greatest thousand-mile road rally you’ve probably never heard of.
Our invitation-only group is limited to pre-1960 classics, many of them without creature comforts like air conditioning—and yet, they’re a pricey bunch, with some rare specimens valued in the tens of millions of dollars. Our group is escorted by a small fleet of Colorado State Troopers, while local businesses welcome our motley crew with coffee stops and lunch.
Organizing all that takes resources, and Mercedes-Benz has sponsored The Grand, as it’s called in classic car circles, for a quarter century. In an era where carmakers must cherry pick alliances from a dizzyingly deep list of automotive events, the affiliation has become particularly significant. Mercedes has reduced, or in some cases entirely withdrawn, its participation in other high-profile classic car events like the Amelia Island and the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
The brand’s involvement in The Grand isn’t just a casual dalliance: In addition to two sponsored entries on the rally (including the 1957 300 SL Roadster I’m piloting), the carmaker brings along mobile mechanics to assist with inevitable breakdowns.
Also in tow are no fewer than six new Mercedes-AMG vehicles ready to be loaned to any participant if their vintage steed fails them, regardless of manufacturer. For what it’s worth, fingers often to point towards tempestuous old-school Italian machinery from the likes of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, and Maserati.
Playing the Heritage Game
On the surface, attempting to reconcile a carmaker’s timeless beauties with their modern intent to sell new cars may seem like a Sisyphean task. After all, few things could be more distant than delicate, time capsule classics and their robust, tech-laden descendants. The power play comes up when carmakers stir the intangible relationships between authenticity, history and desire.
In the cutthroat landscape of new car showrooms, auto brands are facing more of an uphill battle than ever to differentiate their products from bloodthirsty adversaries. With flashy newcomers like Tesla and Genesis—not to mention emerging threats like Rivian and Lucid—that challenge the status quo, legacy manufacturers often bolster their perceived value by playing up their past.
Highlighting those past glories means massive investments in flagship museums (see: BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche), participation in high-profile classic car concours, and adherence to traditional totems like evocative hood ornaments (eg: Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Bugatti, et al). All of which is meant to drive the point home that behind those shiny new cars is a rich history of engineering, innovation, and design.
Brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Land Rover boast heritage divisions which certify and restore classics, while supporting the supply like-new parts for long lost models. For more extreme examples of ancestor worship, look no further than Aston-Martin, Bentley and Jaguar, who have delved decades back into their catalogues to re-issue “new” continuation cars with 7-figure pricetags.
Lamborghini also recognizes the importance of the past, recently spending 25,000 man hours of labor recreating the original Countach concept, a model many credit for spawning the modern supercar era. Though delving into the past more than likely frustrates bean counters who would rather focus on selling new vehicles than waxing poetic about the way things were, playing up a manufacturer’s glory days does have a way of evoking passion that can’t be conjured any other way…
Back to the Future
… which brings us back to Mercedes-Benz. Though cars like the 1957 300 SL Roadster are an obvious fit for events like the Colorado Grand, the brand’s classic convertibles happen to align ideally with the brand’s upcoming 2022 SL Roadster.
The Mercedes-Benz SL, short for “Sport-Leicht” or Sport Light, originated nearly 70 years ago with the race-bred 300 SL. The original SL was a bona fide race car, but the company quickly adapted it into a production model in 1954. That first SL was a famously gullwing-doored coupe, but the automaker replaced the coupe with a more luxurious roadster version in 1957. By then it had also launched a more affordable, but decidedly less rapid, 190 SL convertible.
While the original 300 SL was powered by a 3.0-liter 240-horsepower direct-fuel-injected straight six, the 190 SL used the structure and mechanical components of Mercedes’ contemporary 190 sedan and its 120-horsepower four-cylinder engine.
These two very different SLs were both replaced in 1963 by a vehicle that blended virtues of both, the “Pagoda” 230SL, named for its tall and airy optional hardtop. While subsequent generations have ducked in and out of sportiness, the upcoming model (which Forbes Wheels previewed in a no-cameras-allowed studio setting) takes a marked turn back towards performance.
Extensive weight reduction throughout replaces heavy steel structures with materials like aluminum, magnesium, and carbon fiber. And while the upcoming SL gains vestigial rear seats (a la the Porsche 911), the addition is likelier intended to appease spousal or insurance company demands than it is to offer meaningful seating for actual humans.
Perhaps most crucially, the new SL will feature a more conventional fabric roof, as opposed to the folding hardtop the model has embraced since 2001. The move is notable because so-called ragtops trade sound insulation for lighter weight and a lower center of gravity, which aid acceleration and sharpen handling.
Although the upcoming convertible will surely boast no shortage of cutting-edge technology, it also makes overtures towards amped up athleticism, taking it right back to the original SL, which was focused on performance first.
Bottom Line: Continuity Rules
Mercedes-Benz is still teasing bits and pieces of information about their upcoming roadster, which we’ll share on Forbes Wheels as it becomes available. But what we’ve learned from nearly 1,000 miles in its 64 year-old ancestor cuts to the quick about the substance modern carmakers bring to their lineups by highlighting the past.
The 1957 300 SL was remarkably modern for its time, boasting numerous innovations including a rigid but light tubular-frame chassis and a direct injection engine. Those advances have aged remarkably well, and make for a beautiful vehicle that also happens to be a joy to drive at high speeds over long distances—just what you’d want on a thousand-mile rally. This SL may be near retirement age, but it drives like a more modern vehicle than most other 1950s cars.
The tube-frame 300 SL was exotic in its day, and such a layout is still the province of race cars, but the SL’s reputation for innovation continued in subsequent models. The 1963 “Pagoda” model was one of the first sports cars to incorporate model crash structures and crumple zones. In the 1970s and 1980s, the SL skewed towards luxury, but incorporated advances like anti-lock brakes and (optional) airbags well before most other competitors.
The new SL will undoubtedly take leaps with new technology with the intention of making it more relevant and desirable than ever. Whether or not it catches on with car buyers remains to be seen. How it resonates with brand loyalists who respect the carmaker’s storied past will become an arguably more critical measure of the new SL’s success or failure.
