It doesn’t take much to entice me out of my office and when Pete phoned me up asking if I fancied a road trip to Mercedes-Benz World, I had a job to control my excitement. I have never really fallen in love with any Mercedes, but I do like them, but they are not a car that is ever on my list of cars that I want to buy.
Pete was a little more excited about this road trip out than I was, and by the time we get to Mercedes-Benz World, I pretty much knew everything about the place and could have given guided tours on my first visit.
On the approach road, you could see the circuit, and we had a good friend who I have now nicknamed TomTom in the back of the car giving us driving directions and then went on to give us a history lesson on the area, and by the end of the trip, I was not sure which nickname suited him more… TomTom or Encarta.
Anyway, we pull into the car park and straight away the car park sign flashed up Pete’s registration number and told him to go left. We parked up and started shooting the breeze and throwing the banter around.
We get out of the car and straight away I spot a Porsche 993. Well, that’s made my day!! The first car I photograph at Mercedes-Benz World is a Porsche.
We were kindly greeted with a smile by a pretty lady and in any other circumstance, we would have responded with a smile and a few words but being petrol heads, we almost totally ignored her and went straight to take a look at this 2006 Mercedes Benz CLK GTR Roadster.
The Mercedes Benz CLK GTR Roadster has a seven litre V12 engine which produces 612 BHP with a maximum speed of 199 mph and there were only 6 of these cars built. Very very rare car!!
What a monster of a car and I was in awe of its presents in the room and being 8 years old it still looked cutting edge. I could have spent all day just photographing this car.
We headed straight up the escalators and started looking around, there was so much to see, and we were like six-year-old kids in a sweet shop.
The next car to grab our attention was the 1954 Mercedes Benz 300SL ‘Gullwing’ AMG. Holy cow this is a stunning car, and we must have spent 20 minutes just walking around and taking photos of this blisteringly sexy car.
The 1954 Mercedes Benz 300SL ‘Gullwing’ AMG has a 6 litre V8 engine which provides it with 380 horses and a restricted down top speed of 155mph.
You have to see this car in the flesh to really appreciate its beauty, and I am pretty certain that Pete will be writing a full article on this car because he was totally besotted with it and myself, and TomTom had to literally drag him away from it before he embarrassed himself.
As you would expect from Mercedes-Benz World is lots of AMG’s and we took the opportunity to sit in a few of them and a lot of them felt cramped and when I opened the boot lid on one of them, the spring nearly broke my wrist with its punch.
One of the big attractions to Mercedes-Benz World is the Formula 1 car that is suspended in parts and hanging from the ceiling. It’s hard to explain but hopefully the picture below will help you understand what we mean.
It was very impressive, and I can only imagine how frustrating and satisfying it was to put this together, but it just goes to show the skills of the engineers and the visions of the designers. It really is an incredible work of art.
I took a few photos of the Formula 1 car, but I am not too fussed by them, and they were quite difficult to photograph but they are still worth a good look around and great to see in the flesh.
There is a section where there is a load of Mercedes’s models, and I suddenly became creative with the camera and managed to get a great photograph of them…let me know what you think…
On the way out of Mercedes-Benz World we had a nose around the MayBach servicing centre and saw a lot of exceptionally good-looking cars, but you have to take a look at this SLR 722… wow what a car.
Furthermore, at Mercedes World, there is a skidpan and a circuit but being mid week there was not a lot going on and the cars that were going around were being driven by little miss daisy’s so not much of interest there.
I most certainly will be dropping back to Mercedes-Benz World in the future.
