Maisto 1956 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé

My third Mercedes model is this '56 300 SLR, IMHO one of the greatest sport cars made. Originally only meant for the track a special two where made for the road. The model is from Maisto's Premier collection in scale 1:18. When I bought it there where two in the shop but one had a really nasty finger print on the paint job on the roof , lucky for me I spotted it. All in all it's a very nice model and well worth having.

What I love about this car: The red interior, the big engine and those side exhausts. 

MB 300 SLR

Interesting seat cover design :-)

Nice cockpit

Classic gull wing doors

Twin side exhausts

Straight 8 Cylinder Engine (2891 cc) Yes you have read correctly, straight 8!

The 300 SLR next to it's more famous sibling the 300 SL (left)

Of the nine W196s chassis built, one was destroyed in the Le Mans disaster. Prior to the accident Mercedes motorsport chief Rudolf Uhlenhaut had already ordered two to be set aside for modification into a sort of hybrid between the SLR and the SL, featuring a slightly widened version of the SLR's chassis with enclosed bodywork. The high sill beams of the spaceframe required the fitment of the same famous 'gull-wing' top-hinged doors of the other two types. For testing, and in preparation for a possible Mercedes participation in the 1956 race season, two road-legal SLRs were built. Due to Mercedes' planned withdrawal from competitive motorsport at the end of 1955, the programme was abandoned, leaving Uhlenhaut to use one of the cars as a company car. This prolonged road use required the fitting of an extra suitcase-sized muffler to the near-unsilenced exhaust pipes to avoid arrest for breach of the peace.

This Uhlenhaut Coupé was regarded as the world's fastest car in the 1950s, and it is rumoured that, running late for a meeting, Uhlenhaut exploited the unlimited autobahns to make today's two-and-a-half-hour journey from Munich to Stuttgart (approximately 137 miles/220 km) in just over an hour. The Uhlenhaut Coupe was road tested by the US magazine Motor Trend and by two English journalists from Automobile Revue at four o'clock in the morning on a closed section of motorway outside Munich. The latter wrote; "We are driving a car which barely takes a second to overtake the rest of the traffic and for which 120 mph on a quiet motorway is little more than walking pace. With its unflappable handling through corners, it treats the laws of centrifugal force with apparent disdain," after a total of more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km). His only regret was that this was a sports car "which we will never be able to buy and which the average driver would never buy anyway.".