Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

They’re used to winning – Adil Jal Darukhanawala, wrote a whole book on it!

By Shahzad Sheikh

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

Appropriately enough with Mercedes  taking the honours this year in F1, we look at a superb new volume on Mercedes racing success by well-known Indian Motoring Journalist, Adil Jal Darukhanawala.

‘Mercedes-Benz Winning!’ looks at 120 years of the storied brand’s motor racing success from the very first motor-sport even in the world – the 1894 Paris-Rouen Trials to its current domination of Formula 1.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

The large-format hefty hardcover 405-page book features an incredible 970 images, most never published before and 197,000 words.

Copies can be bought online directly from the publisher at www.djmedia.org or from www.flipkart.com or www.amazon.in. It is also available from selected fine book stores in India and pricing for overseas markets is US $180 which is inclusive of air courier charges.

ISBN-10: 8193198905
ISBN-13: 978-8193198902

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

We exclusively spoke to Adil about the book and asked him to highlight his favourite bits:

Q: How long did it take you to research and write the book?

A: The research began ever since the day I saw my first motor sport event live: August 26, 1977 when the Singapore Airlines London-Sydney Marathon whizzed through my town! From then on I was hooked and it all just started to pile up. Automotive and motor sporting history I soaked it all in and even to this day continue to soak it up.

My understanding of Mercedes-Benz history was tremendous but I just couldn’t get to grips with the amount of images and artifacts I had to play with! There are 970 images in the book but it was a nightmare selecting them for I had ten times the number to go through!

I framed the chapters according to the natural timelines right from Benz & Cie and Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft’s incorporation in the 1880s and this helped me frame the general contours of the book.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

In fact, I wanted to tackle the book on an intuitive level with just a preamble for each chapter so as to set the context and then let the pictures say the story with comprehensive captions otherwise it would have been very boring. I think this has been much appreciated by many all over the automotive firmament in India and Europe.

The one area where I just didn’t have any back up was the section on Mercedes-Benz in India and this was done quite simply due to the last four decades of my travels in India and picking up nuggets of information, exploring leads, knowing fellow enthusiasts with great examples of the three-pointed star and also poring over reams and reams of old Indian newspapers trying to find anything with a car in it and then digging deep to know if it was spelt M-E-R-C-E-D-E-S or B-E-N-Z !

Overall once I had most everything in place, the actual work took me about 18 months to put together and the book was finally unveiled on the eve of Auto Expo in New Delhi in February this year.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

Q: Pick ten of your favourite / most significant things in the book.

A: Here goes:

1. The most significant fact is that both Daimler and Benz were at it in motor sport from the very first car race in the world – the 1894 Paris – Rouen Trials, and the entity Mercedes-Benz is yet going strong to this very day in 2016!

No other carmaker in the world can boast of such an illustrious heritage. The top ten finishers in the world’s first car race included nine French cars powered by Daimler engines while the tenth was a Benz. Nuff said!

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

2. The men who raced these cars in the first two decades of the sport were supermen and you had to hand it to the likes of Christian Lautenschlager, Camille Jenatzy et al who drove these high seated monsters on tyres with a 4 to 5-inch tread width at best, many a time with no front brakes, in races that took almost eight to ten hours and on surfaces that were torturous to even walk on!

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

3. ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ was coined in all its sincerity from the earliest days of motor racing where nothing helped bump up a carmaker’s credibility than in the heat of competition.

To excel in racing not only helped the rapid evolution of road going machinery but also helped sell them. Wonder where this thought got misplaced among many carmakers in modern times.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

4. The technological progress ushered in via racing has been nothing short of stupendous and here the German brand outshone most of its contemporaries: the honey comb radiator, overhead camshaft engines, supercharging, the highest specific outputs from engines in the 1930s GP cars that were only bettered by the F1 cars in the turbocharged era in the 1980s, the first attempts at rear-engined race cars, the adoption of traction control in the late 1930s, mechanical direct fuel injection, air brakes, etc.

This is a tradition that has continued to this day, especially in the new hybrid F1 era where the Mercedes-Benz power units have dominated the last few championship seasons.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

5. The ever-changing face of the sport and the way the public perceives it have been the key aspects that have undergone change while seemingly remaining the same! People came to see the gladiators do battle and they yet do but safety standards have improved by light years but at the end of it all is yet man and machine in unison against rivals with talent, skill, strategy, preparation, guile, luck all thrown into the mix.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

6. I love the part about Mercedes-Benz being the only non-Italian car maker to win the great Mille Miglia race twice, first with Rudolf Caracciola in an SSK in 1931 and then with Stirling Moss in 1955. It was the greatest road race in the world and also one of the fastest, most evocative, highly dangerous and always living on borrowed time.

In the 23-year history of the event (24 if you count the pseudo-1940 event won by a BMW 328), Italian cars won 21 of those outright so the two wins by the white SSK and the silver 300SLR rank very high in the pantheon.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

7. The biggest tectonic shift in Grand Prix racing came in the 1930s with the advent of the Silver Arrows from 1934-39. This era is for me the most fabled era in Grand Prix racing and I agree with so many of the men I grew up reading who termed it the Golden Age of Grand Prix motor racing. The W125 from 1937 was the most powerful GP car of its time and its peak outputs were only matched almost 4 decades later by the 1.5-litre turbocharged Grand Prix cars of the 1980s!

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

8. Pulling the veritable rabbit out of the hat and Mercedes-Benz did it a few times with alacrity. The first was to get even with the Italians in voiturette racing in 1939 with the W165. Two cars were built with 1.5-litre supercharged V8 engines (incidentally the first V8 configuration engine ever from Mercedes-Benz in its history) in secrecy in a manner of months and sprung up on the hapless Italians in the Tripoli Grand Prix where they walloped all comers to a 1-2 victory and then they were laid up for good!

Closer to our time, Mercedes-Benz worked with Penske and Ilmor Engineering to push a loophole in the Indy 500 regs for pushrod engines and create a power unit – again in utter secrecy – with which they went on to win the 1994 Indy 500, emphatically! Not surprisingly, Indianapolis changed the rules for the pushrod engines immediately post the 1994 event making the Mercedes-Ilmor unit the only one in the modern era to win on debut in the only race it was allowed to!

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

9. The awesome 450SLC V8 rally car that was a dinosaur but such a handsome and powerful brute in the days before the Audi Quattro pioneered all-wheel drive.

It was probably the most powerful front engine, rear wheel drive rally car ever and the way its pilots could make it slide and slither through African jungle, Grecian gravel, Argentine out backs, etc. by men like Hannu Mikkola and Bjorn Waldegaard marked it out as one of the iconic rally cars that should have won more events than just the couple of Ivory Coast Rallies that they eventually bagged. I loved this brute and yet lust for it whenever I see one in the silver and black livery of the works team.

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

10. The Indian history of the brand as a whole is one of the cornerstones of the book and quite simply makes me whoop with delight every time I flip the pages open to check something out!

Putting this together was clearly a bit intimidating but the fact that I could drum up so much (this section accounts for a quarter of the book’s 405 pages!) has astonished me no end and yet continues to!

This was the first time ever that anyone had attempted to chronicle the journey of an automotive marque in India and in doing so I unearthed many gems hitherto unknown to 99.9 per cent of them all!

Book Review – Mercedes-Benz Winning!

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