While international convention at the time was that German cars should be painted white (Britain was green, Italy red and France blue), Mercedes team bosses decided that their Targa cars would be painted red so that, from a distance, they might be confused with an Italian entry. You can understand why: dark tales of skulduggery were told of foreign entries encountering large rocks left on the sharper corners, tree branches mysteriously appearing on the track and so on. All perfectly coincidental, of course, but eventualities that Mercedes was determined to avoid.
“It’s not a disadvantage in an Italian street race to have your car painted red,” says Marcus Breitschwerdt, the boss of the museum. The exigency of this repaint is shown in the original pictures, with Werner’s car fitted with mudguards borrowed from another car with their undersides left in the traditional Mercedes white.
This “winning” car didn’t stay long in the works, however. In 1925 it was sold to privateer racer Wilhelm Eberhardt. It was entered for various races, but since Eberhardt loved driving it on the road, he had the body widened to better accommodate his wife as a passenger, also fitting a full windscreen and lights. Thus changed, it was repurchased by Mercedes in 1937 and was displayed in various museums, then in 1961 moved to the factory museum in Untertürkheim, to the east of Stuttgart, where Mercedes is based.
The big discovery
It was only in 2022 that the car was taken down from the display. What had been thought to be a “freshening up” initially, ready for the anniversary, quickly became a painstaking process of research and cataloguing, with a significant discovery.
The body and drivetrain were removed from the frame. The body was placed in a full-length hot box to re-anneal the aluminium so it could be worked on without it cracking, while preparations were made to reduce it to its original width. The drivetrain was carefully stripped and the museum’s experts pored over documents in the Mercedes archives to discover what they could of the car.