Holland clogged with classic cars

THEY’RE not just famous for losing the World Cup and putting their fingers in holes to keep out the sea.

Mecedes Benz 540k Streamliner Image supplied Picture: Supplied

LOOK, I know many of you are already packing the Samsonite, getting the travellers cheques and pricing the duty-free smokes for your trip to Pebble Beach.

The second week of August in Pebble Beach is to car persons what New Year, Chanukah, Eid ul-Fitr and Jamshed Navaroz is to non-motorists of other religions. I’m not going to spend too much time detailing the delights of being on the Monterey Peninsula next month because you’ve heard me rabbit on about it for years. Let’s just say if you love erotic auto art, beauty, the sounds that only perfectly tuned big bore engines can make, plus free drinks, then be there or be square.

But let’s all agree on one thing. We are not going to mention the F word for the rest of the year. Dave Gooding, Rick Cole, RM, Bonhams, Russo & Steele and Mecum all will be selling Ferraris at prices that will make Monets look positively cheap. The classic car bubble won’t burst in the six Pebble Beach auctions but eventually it will. How do I know? Because the Dutch are buying every decent classic car on sale in Australia and shipping them back to clog land.

Remember the Dutch? They’re not just famous for losing the World Cup and putting their fingers in holes to keep out the sea. They started tulipmania. This was the early precursor to Ferrarimania. In the early 1600s you could pick up a rare tulip bulb for around 1000 guilders.

A few years later the price had gone up 500 per cent or the same price as a top house in the Peppermint Grove of Amsterdam. You know the rest of the story.

The main reason to head to the west coast for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance this year is the unveiling of the 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Streamliner. Restored and rebuilt over two years by the factory, this one off art deco masterpiece is simply sex on wheels. Merc used to build the world’s most beautiful and most raceable cars. Then they built the world’s most bulletproof cars. Then they went through a quality and styling nightmare but now the sultans from Stuttgart are making serious and occasionally very fast cars again. But you wouldn’t know because they aren’t great at promoting them.

Cars like the C63 AMG, now on special at around $150,000. Happiness is a small car jammed full with a big V8. It’s good for 0 to 100kmh in 4.4 seconds but with better tyres you can get a sub-4 traffic light start.

OK. Let’s go back 77 years. The good folks at Mercedes in Sindelfingen (near the headquarters of the Schwippe River where today there is a super swimming pool with a giant water slide) decided to enter the Berlin Rome race to showcase the company’s styling at technological superiority. Look at the photo. This car is the perfect example of Streamline Moderne, the art deco styling trend originating in the US with everyday consumer products but then turned up with the Chrysler Airflow and the Airstream caravan. That Merc body is aluminium. The designers were so concerned with aerodynamics that they painted a star on the bonnet rather than disrupt the airflow with a metal one. And it all worked. The Streamliner was good for a supercharged 185 kmh.

But the race never happened, the Yanks commandeered the Streamliner during the war and finally it simply disappeared. Luckily the Merc people never throw out anything and in the back of the storeroom were a whole heap of spares that they put on the original chassis and rear axle. Tiny bits of the body remained so it took 4800 hours to recreate it. Earlier this year the lads at the factory decided to see how fast it was. Off to the Paperburg test track where it was good once again for a very scary 186kph.

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