The first Mercedes-Benz W110 to compete in the 24 Hours of LeMons was this ’65 190, and it did very well in spite of having spent many years vegetating in a California field prior to being brought back to life as an endurance racer. Last weekend, we saw another W110; this time it was a ’67 200 that spent a few idle years in Texas before waking up on a race track.
Team B League Film Society – How I Learned To Stop Whining And Love The Judges was expecting to have many problems with their 44-year-old luxury automobile, but only a few fuel-filter-clogging incidents forced the car in for repairs. Otherwise, the car kept going around and around the track (the same could not be said for the team’s other car, a Jetta that blew its engine three laps into prerace practice and got a DNS).
When you bring a car like this to a LeMons race, you really don’t need to decorate the car with a theme like this, but we appreciate the extra effort. That thing on the roof is a replica of the bomb Slim Pickens rode to glory while going toe-to-toe with the Rooskies in nuclear combat in Dr. Strangelove.
Quite an appropriate theme for a Texas race!
The 200 wasn’t particularly quick— in fact, its 2:26.659 best lap was the slowest of the entire 81-entry field— but the team came in 48th place after doing 241 laps at 2.38 miles apiece. That’s 573 miles of about the worst punishment you can dish out to a car; quite an achievement for an elderly sedan that was never meant to go anywhere near a race track!
Photo source: Nick Pon
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