Doug Nye: The "Blue Wonder" is a landmark piece of Mercedes F1 history

It proved highly successful, and although at the time there was some question of it having been just a one-off, there was really little doubt that Lord March and his tiny team would repeat the event come 1994, and soon the bandwagon was up and rolling… we had a tiger by the tail and we were all puffing and panting just to keep up with the expectations of participants, sponsors and public alike. 

Five years ago, in 2013, one of the 20^th anniversary Festival’s most newsworthy features was the Bonhams auction sale of Fangio’s German and Swiss Grand Prix-winning Mercedes-Benz W196 from 1954-55. It fetched the staggering price of £19,601,500. That Sale was jam-packed with all kinds of other valuable collectors' cars, and overall it realised £36million. Not too shabby then, for a mere afternoon’s work… (tell that to the Bonhams guys, who – as usual – were actually on their knees after months of preparatory work). 

Now one of the fun things about offering that Grand Prix Mercedes, from my point of view, was that I pretty much got to nurse-maid it for six months prior to the Sale. Having it inspected and verified by the Mercedes Museum technicians was an instructive pleasure, but that was just the beginning. When I followed the 1954 and ’55 seasons so eagerly as a kid – and was overjoyed when our man Moss actually beat Fangio to the line in his W196 to win the ’55 British GP at Aintree – I could never have dreamed that one day I would be unscrewing W196 panels, and dropping the undertray, and guiding would-be bidders around this sister car’s complex, and gorgeously made, intricacies. But that’s what happened.

One of the great features of that programme was the unstinting assistance we received from Mercedes-Benz themselves. This extended to them providing their reconstruction of the contemporary works team’s fabulous high-speed transporter, on which to display the great car in our Goodwood Sale marquee. 

The original high-speed transporter had been conceived by Rennabteilung chief engineer Rudi Uhlenhaut to hurry team cars whenever might be required in an emergency from the factory to the race circuits of Europe and back. Uhlenhaut had a keen sense of fun as well as a strictly-business, intensely serious commitment to absolute engineering excellence. The Flash Gordon styling of the extreme forward-control high-speed transporter was in part evidence of that. And on occasion – as in the 1955 Italian Grand Prix at Monza when the works Mercedes W196 variants tried in early practice proved wanting, an alternative was rushed down overnight from Stuttgart – the ‘Blue Wonder’ as the German press nicknamed it – going like the clappers all the way. 

While the contemporary Mercedes-Benz team took nine race wins at 12 Formula 1 races this extraordinary one-off special became a prominent part of the organisation’s brand promotion. As the German company now put it, in retrospect “…the admiration for the once innovative and elegant transport solution was often greater than that for the racing car itself. The blue racing car carrier was both the first and the fastest.” 

However, after the works team withdrew from Formula 1 at the end of 1955, there was no particular use for the high-speed transporter. It’s a big thing, and it took up valuable workshop, garage or later warehouse space. Finally, it was taken out to a remote corner of the factory test track at Stuttgart-Unterturkheim, it was parked and essentially left to the mercy of the baking sun, wind, rain and winter snow. Ignored, forgotten, it simply rotted away and eventually was consigned for scrap, it was making the place untidy.

Late in his tenure as overall chief engineer, Rudi Uhlenhaut regretfully appreciated that neglecting ‘The Blue Wonder’ had been a bad mistake. A project was launched to recreate the transporter.

It took seven years and reputedly 6,000 hours of work to do so. The story was that no drawings or detail records had been kept, because it had all been more or less an Uhlenhaut off-budget, unofficial spare-time project… until it proved so useful to the PR department. All they had to work from was supposedly a technical data sheet and a few photos. 

With the help of surviving works team mechanics and engineers, Mercedes-Benz succeeded in reproducing ‘The Blue Wonder’ – with a few necessary specification changes: The original used a 300SL 240-horsepower engine. The replica had a more modest 192hp unit installed. The driver’s cab remained reminiscent of a Mercedes-Benz Ponton 180 while the X-shaped chassis frame and other details were as close to being correct as proved practically possible.

Mercedes-Benz then chose our 2001 Goodwood Festival of Speed for the newly re-constructed racing car transporter’s public debut, as part of the company’s centenary celebrations. And for many enthusiasts ‘The Blue Wonder’ once again stole the show.

Now when this rakish projectile became such a wonderful display stand for the W196 back at Goodwood in 2013, it had been unloaded and moved out onto the back lawn at the House to free space for auction seating at the Sale itself. Once that event was over, as on every Festival Friday evening, the Bonhams auction marquee had to be completely cleared and converted overnight into the many-hundreds seating dining hall for the rest of the weekend.

The Blue Wonder provided a bizarre sight out there on the grass, but we got it fired up and I rode round to the paddock in it with its minders, Gert Straub and Manfred Oechsle. I just recall feeling very exposed stuck out there in that forward control cab, so far ahead of the action, and I learned that apparently, it was not the most reassuring thing to drive – but then unlike the original, it had never been fully developed, nor used in earnest at high speed.

Subsequently, another such replica was constructed and as far as I am aware two ‘Blue Wonders’ are now in existence, where previously there was one – and prior to that, well, none.

The developing interest in the Historic world over the past 25 years has been studded by several landmarks, and for me the combination of the high-speed transporter’s reincarnation, and the ex-Fangio W196’s spectacular sale, certainly qualify as two of them.

Photography courtesy of The GP Library