Page 85 - Wayne Carini's Guide to Affordable Classics

The otherwise beautiful Mercedes 190 SL struggled to in the shadow of the brilliant 300 SL. A planned six-cylinder upgrade was scrapped due to its impact on manufacturing cadence and development resources.
THE BACKSTORY
Were it not for an accident of industrial timing, the world might never have seen the Mercedes W113 “Pagoda,” or at least not in the form we know it today. Back in the mid-1950s, the engineers and planners at Daimler-Benz were wringing their hands over its predecessor, the dowdy 190 SL, which seemed not at all able to emerge from the long shadow cast by the legendary 300 SL. As the story goes, US importer Max Hoffman pushed for the 190 SL as a more accessible alternative to the 300 SL, but despite being a product, as Hoffman’s advertising billed it, that “the entire world has waited for,” there just were not that many waiting.
Undertaking the challenge of the getting a little more zip of out of the pokey 190 SL in the summer of 1956, chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut, along with motorsports boss Karl Kling, experimented with various six-cylinder options, eventually settling on a 130-horsepower 2.2-liter six derived from the 220 “Ponton” sedan, upgraded with fuel injection. But there was a problem and it was a massive one. The development time required to insert the six into the 190 SL would create a manufacturing cadence issue as well as force incremental factory investment to maintain the older 190 assembly process alongside the forthcoming all-new W111 family, scheduled to launch in 1959. This led to an obvious question: instead of propping up the aging 190 SL with a new engine, why not replace it with a derivative of the W111 coupe, thereby getting a newer car, sooner, that would be much easier to build alongside the beautiful new W111?
Styling work quickly spawned a progression of theme models that were riffs on the 190 and 300 SL, but quickly matured into a carefully downsized, two-seat sibling of the W111 coupe, though with some distinctive differences, especially the perpetuation of its SL forebears’ horizontal grille, which helped visually widen its front end. On the inside, a horizontally themed instrumental panel was dominated by large speedometer and tachometer gauges and flanked by two chromed air vents. In addition to a glove box, there was a small wooden tray between the seats.
With a narrow side-view body section defined by relatively large wheel openings, the W113 was shockingly modern for its day, as evidenced from studio photos comparing the near-final design to the 190 SL, with the latter looking like something from an entirely different era. But the biggest shock was about to come from Vienna-born Béla Barényi, head of Mercedes’ pre-development organization. Collaborating closely with his design colleague Paul Bracq, a new concave-shaped hardtop proposal was integrated into the W113’s final design, claiming benefits not only of rollover safety but also entry/egress and visibility. With its thin pillars and huge glass area, it made for a very attractive addition to the soft- top version (so much so that some owners today never remove their hardtops at all). The foreign press later nicknamed it a “pagoda” roof and the model’s nickname has stuck ever since.
Intended as convertible from the start, the W113’s stiff monocoque structure was married to an isolated front subframe that located the engine and front suspension. Front suspension was by unequal-
Mercedes-Benz 230/250/280 SL
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