Mercedes-Benz Rolls Out The Classics

PH gets its '80s thang on' in an Astral Silver 500SL

By Chris-R / Thursday, 15 July 2010 / Loading comments

When it comes to old motors here on PH, we love to fill our boots and the last few weeks have seemed like a heritage fest with

Goodwood

, the

Le Mans Classic

and

Range Rover's 40th

keeping us busy.

Pre-Goodwood you might remember we had a brief go in an early Jag E-Type, so it was interesting a few days later to get our hands on a car that - for a short period at least - went head-to-head with the E-Type in the showrooms.

The Mercedes-Benz R107 (aka the SL roadster) was in production from 1971 (the E-Type was still offered up to 1974) right up until 1989, making it the firm's longest-serving road car. PH was lucky enough to drive one of the last models from Brooklands to Weybridge on the Saturday morning at the FoS.

The car belongs

the Mercedes-Benz museum at Stuttgart

, where it is part of an ever-expanding fleet of 700 classics kept in perfect running order. (The museum collection runs to 'one of everything' for earlier models, but newer additions are limited to one of each body style as there are now so many different engine and trim options.)

A number of cars had been shipped over to Brooklands as part of M-B's Goodwood activity, including four original Gullwings, and we could have spent a whole day just drooling over them in the Brooklands Hotel car park.

Instead, we were chucked the keys to a 1988 500SL in Astral Silver, and spent a wonderful couple of hours running top-down to West Sussex in what used to be Merc's flagship sportscar.

To me, the R107 shape still seems relatively modern, but then so does Beverley Hills Cop - a 1984 movie which was greatly enhanced by the presence of a bright red 450SL. And if you're too young to remember Bobby Ewing driving one in Dallas, and the car's starring role in Hart to Hart, we don't want to know about it...

So we came down to earth with a bit of a bump when we got the thing out on the road. The driving experience may not have been quite as archaic as that earlier generation E-Type, but it's certainly 'classic'. Clunky damping, woolly steering, body roll and dodgy ergonomics were still big in the '80s, and as for a 5.0 V8 engine making 240bhp - we'd be laughing at that today, right? (In case you were wondering, the car was good for 134mph when new, and 0-60mph in 7.4secs which, to be fair, doesn't compare badly with the latest 500SL's 155mph and 5.4secs when you consider a quarter of a century has passed!)

We loved it to bits naturally, from its period driving lamps to that fabulous rubber rear spoiler, and if we were looking for a 'useable classic' for Sunny weekends it's the sort of machine that would sorely tempt us. Actually we're not looking, but

there are definitely some nice ones about...

More Mercedes-Benz Museum collection classics at Brooklands: