Powering down the tarmac of the Salinas Airport, surrounded by the parked private jets that ferried some subset of the ultra-wealthy into the Monterey Peninsula for so-called Car Week, I get that familiar sensation. It is not, or not solely, the intimately evocative scent of warm oil and horsehair stuffing and indestructible leather and houndstooth upholstery. And it’s not just the knurled and scratched silver faceplate of the Becker cassette stereo, mounted vertically in the center console. And it’s not just the slick woven-ribbed detents in the giant steering wheel, the circumference of which approximates that of one of Uranus’ rings.
It is the ability to pierce and inhabit the liquidity of time.
Nearly a decade ago, during the very week in which The Drive launched, I—as a foundational contributor to this site—drove and wrote about my time behind the wheel of a V8-powered Mercedes C111 concept car at Pebble Beach. It was a stellar experience, a paragon moment of space-time mindfuckery, driving a concept car designed in the year I was born, to reflect a projected future ideal that we never inhabited. And now I was back on site, driving yet another iteration of that tawny spaceship, rocketing at once forward and back into my personal timeline.
The C111, of which only a dozen were built, was created in part as a design exercise, one of the earliest iterations of the angular “wedge” styling that dominated concept car profiles for much of the succeeding decade (and supercar profiles for much longer than that). At once sharp and slippery, it was created to cheat the wind and eke additional performance and handling out of advanced aerodynamics.
But it was also built as a test bed for the Wankel engine, a combustive creation invented by a hardcore Nazi in the 1930s. Founded in black magic that promised enhanced power, efficiency, and reduced weight, it arrived just at a moment when vehicles were preparing to face increased regulations around fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. The car was first shown with a 275-horsepower three-rotor direct fuel-injected Wankel, but the following year, wanting to reach a hypothetical target top speed of 186 mph (300 km/h), a four-rotor version with 350 hp was revealed. This was the car I drove this year.
“This car was designed around the Wankel engine,” a Mercedes Classic Center technician told me before the drive. “So a car with this engine, especially the final four-rotor version, this is the true experience of this car.”
It is sometimes startling how deeply certain cars imprint on my psyche. I’ve been fortunate to drive legendary cars that, as a car-worshiping child in 1970s Detroit, were the stuff of Hot Wheels, posters, worn magazine articles, and evanescent dreams. I’ve been behind the wheel of Gary Cooper’s Duesenberg SSJ, a Mercedes 540K, a Facel Vega, and every generation of V12 Lamborghini. But as soon as I slide across the wide vinyl-lined sill of the C111 and pivot my legs into the narrow tube that houses the pedal box, I am immediately brought back to that 2015 drive.
I remember the weird view over the arching fenders and the rear-view mirror perspective on similarly arching rear abutments. The precise-yet-wallowy nature of the dogleg ZF transmission, with its shifter-knob-mounted push-button detent for first gear. The heavy steering. The hot air churning through the ventilation system.
But what I wasn’t expecting was the precise balance of the chassis and handling, the ease and stolidity with which it all came together, or the power: the latex smoothness of its delivery. Though I was prevented from exploring the upper reaches of the rev range—the car would be displayed on the lawn at the Concours a few days hence—the delivery was nothing short of astounding. Its 350 hp matched the output of the era’s Ferraris, in a structure that was several hundred pounds lighter.
Nine years ago, I’d barely gotten the V8 car out of second gear. I was on the 17-Mile Drive surrounded by billions of dollars of other collectible metal. But here on the runway, I could open up the car and experience its eagerness, its evenness, and its thirst to go faster. Also, it’s thirst, like all Wankels, for oil and internal components.
“With the Wankel engine, we could not achieve the durability standards that are required for Mercedes Benz,” the technician told me. “So this engine project was canceled.”
Concept cars are about what could have been. And the C111 was created as a laboratory to test possibilities, especially those imbued in emergent technologies. In addition to powerplants, it was the locus for Mercedes’ earliest experimentations with polymer body panels, turbocharging, and anti-lock braking systems. It was never meant to become a typical passenger car, or even an atypical one, though customers begged for Mercedes to produce it as an exotic road car, and offered blank checks for the opportunity. So, while pressing the accelerator, I pressed the issue, wondering what might have occurred should the Wankeled C111, despite its lack of Benz standard-bearing bearings, have become a supercar of its era.
“An engine-out service every 15,000 or 20,000 miles is typical for a Ferrari of that era,” I said. “Or even for our era. For a car with that kind of technology and performance, it wouldn’t have been unexpected, or a deal killer.”
The technician nodded in agreement, then shrugged. “Mercedes,” he said, “is not Ferrari.”
I’m a lover of cars that exist out of time, that are enough standard deviations removed from their peers that they appear almost beamed in from another dimension. This includes outliers like the Citroën DS and the Dymaxion. It even includes Mercedes’ own 300 SL Gullwing. I mention this to the technician as we complete our drive, this idea that Mercedes used to dream, that it could have ditched its Teutonic rationality and built a Wankel supercar, that maybe it will someday, again. He nodded in agreement, then shrugged again.
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