With no PH classifieds to distract me yesterday morning, my attention turned to Top Trumps. One of my children had spread a modern pack around the house, and looking at the subject matter it struck me that there was something missing.
Superb presence from head-on
They were all real, tangible cars. I had seen them all moving on television. Where were the barely believable concept machines with guesswork performance data? Where was the Ferrari Pinin? The Sbarro Monster? And where was the Isdera Imperator?
Ah, the Isdera Imperator: the result of one Eberhard Schulz being unwilling to allow the Mercedes CW311 concept to simply disappear and be forgotten forever. Merc didn’t want to build the car, but it allowed Schulz to go ahead and do just that, using Mercedes engines. He called it the Imperator 108i and for this ten-year-old it occupied a space in car mythology somewhere between the Countach and the Cizeta V16, in that I suspected it actually moved, but didn’t believe it was a proper car. Mostly because, aged ten, I had no idea it was a stillborn Mercedes engineering study.
Periscope rear-view mirror was ingenious
Well, thanks to YouTube, all those illusions are now shattered. The Isdera doesn’t just move; according to
this video
, it hammers around the Nurburgring in pretty treacherous conditions with its periscope mirror sitting proud.
I don’t know whether to feel bereft or somehow completed. Either way, I never expected to see what I thought was a make-believe Top Trumps car driven like this.
And here’s what it looks like from the outside.
[Images: Isdera / Silosarg]