The Mercedes-Benz W154 of the famous driver Rudolf Caracciola is the only example in the world that has never been renovated. It still has tires from the last race before the Second World War and can be seen in the National Technical Museum in Prague.
The interwar years were one of the craziest eras in motorsport. European Grand Prix racing tracks have been dominated by unrivaled automotive monsters of the Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz brands. The culmination of the “golden era of car racing” from the stable of legendary silver arrows was the Mercedes-Benz W154 from 1938 to 1939. Automotive historians still remember it as one of the most perfect racing cars of all time.
In the pre-World War II era, Nazi propaganda bet on car racing and invested huge amounts of money in the development of increasingly faster and more extreme racing cars. The initiator of Nazi car propaganda was Adolf Hitler himself. After his assumption of power in Germany, he offered a reward of half a million Reichsmarks for a car company that would successfully develop a racing single-seater according to the new regulations.
After the unrestricted and dangerous years 1931 to 1933, the International Sports Commission AIACR issued new rules for the following season of 1934. They newly limited the empty weight of the car without operating fluids and tires to a maximum of 750 kilograms and the minimum body width to 850 millimeters. All other parameters of future single-seaters were free. But racing teams approached it in a different way than the authors of the rules expected.
The main goal was safer racing, but in reality a crazy era had begun. Engineers started working on new, even faster single-seaters. They relied on large powerful engines and sought maximum weight savings, even by drilling through the chassis beams. Mercedes-Benz thus worked its way from the initial W25 car before the evolution of the W125 to the top single-seater W154.
This is perhaps the rarest and most expensive historic car in the Czech Republic, which you can see in public almost every day. One of the main stars of Prague’s National Technical Museum is the Mercedes-Benz W154, which is currently the only one of the nine surviving pieces that has not been restored. Only fourteen were produced in the final years before World War II.
It appeared in what was then Czechoslovakia already in the war years, when the Germans were looking for a safe shelter from Allied bombers for the quiet Mercedes W154. A pair of single-seaters, designated by the factory as number 9 and 10, found it in northern Bohemia in the former Schramm textile factory near Nová Paka.
In May 1945, Czechoslovak car and motorcycle racer Antonín Vitvar discovered them and took them to his workshop in Nové Paca. In terms of post-war laws and international agreements, as well as other German property, they fell to the Czechoslovak state as war reparations. Antonín Vitvar gave them to the Automobile Club of the Czechoslovak Republic, which sold the car with number 9 to the United States of America in 1946.
The more historically significant Mercedes-Benz W154, chassis number 10 with production number 189440, can still be seen in Prague today. It was one of the factory team’s most successful cars and was most often driven by Rudolf Caracciola, Mercedes-Benz’s most famous driver and three-time winner of the European Championship in 1935, 1937 and 1938.
The Czech Mercedes W154 made its competitive debut on July 3, 1938 at the French Grand Prix in Reims. Rudolf Caracciola drove it to second place, as he did three weeks later at the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. During the 1938 season, he subsequently appeared in four other races, but three of them as training – at the Coppa Ciano, Coppa Acerbo and the Swiss Grand Prix. Unfortunately, he did not finish the Grand Prix in Donington, England, due to a fire during refueling.
For the 1939 season, the W154 single-seaters were improved with enlarged fuel tanks with a resulting total volume of 420 liters, brake drums with ventilation vanes for better heat dissipation and ethylene-glycol engine cooling, which allowed the engineers to reduce the radiator and lower the nose of the car. Already at the end of the 1938 season, it became clear that the competing ten-cylinder Auto Unions were faster on the straights, so they developed four modernized M154 engines in Stuttgart.
The upgraded unit with the serial number M20 did not appear in the Czech Mercedes W154 until around the middle of the 1939 season. It differed from the previous design with two parallel compressors of the same size by a newer solution with the serial connection of a primary larger and a secondary smaller compressor. The maximum output of the three-liter twin-cylinder engine thus increased to 357 kW (485 hp), and the torque at low and medium speeds also increased.
In the 1939 season, “our” W154 raced a total of five times. At the Grand Prix of Pau, he was only a practice single-seater, and in the next four races he was always driven by Rudolf Caracciola. At the ADAC Eifelrennen at the Nürburgring in May, he finished second, then still with an old type of engine. In the next three races, he started with a new, more powerful unit.
At the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps in June, he was left standing after a ninth-lap skid with a dead engine, and Caracciola had to retire from the race. The single-seaters were not equipped with a battery or a starter, and the mechanics started them by pushing the car or using a special device. In July at the Nürburgring, he won the last pre-war German Grand Prix and finished the war-interrupted 1939 season in second place behind team-mate Hermann Lang at the Swiss Grand Prix.
So next time you make a trip to the National Technical Museum in Prague, remember this story when looking at the never-renovated Mercedes-Benz W154. In the Czech Republic, you can see a real automotive treasure that appeared in the museum collection as early as 1949. In the nineties, there were even interested parties from abroad who wanted to buy it for up to one billion crowns!
The Czech Mercedes-Benz W154 is still wearing tires from the last race before the war, where Rudolf Caracciola himself polished them. As the only one of the nine preserved cars in the world, it does not have its historical value “destroyed” by renovations. However, it will never be started again, because the cracking of the crankshaft roller bearing cages, typical for engines, can lead to the irreversible destruction of the heart of this unique car.
You can visit the National Technical Museum in Prague every day, except Mondays, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
2023-10-18 16:50:00
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