Old Merc’s never die

Last night I found a new home for the Panzer. My lovely old Benz with its wedding-car white paintwork has been spotted sitting in its leafy abode by a fellow enthusiast and owner of at least one classic Fintail. Via our network of friends and neighbours he tracked me down to Switzerland and after a short negotiation on the phone we decided that it should not be allowed to sit and rust, but be towed to his dry warm garage and gradually put back to its former glorious state for motoring around La Sarthe. Of course there will be an exchange of a few hundred Euros in order to cover my costs of meeting him but mainly for the procurement of my next one…

For me that’s a top result. The thought of such a beautiful piece of late 60’s engineering just rotting into the ground was always quite disturbing. Its tyres stayed up in defiance, the body work was basically solid underneath tin-worm tattered door skins and its defining huge chrome bumpers weren’t even pitted through. The masterful ten rectangle grille stood proud and would quite happily clonk your skull as you pottered about under a raised bonnet. The sumptuous seats still had plenty of bounce in them and only some of the wood veneer was de-veneering. Fittingly that most iconic of car badges the three-pointed star signifying Daimler Benz’s dominance of land, sea and air shone bright as any star should. I’ve even been having trouble deciding what to do with the mechanical fuel injection pump that was removed in the false belief that two non-Mercedes specialists (there is a second villain involved in the skulduggery here…) could foolishly rebuild such a thing consisting of several hundred parts, built with the precision of a Swiss watch, using just a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. Now I don’t have to worry for it can be returned to its rightful place alongside the rest of the two point eight litre six cylinder engine that it once fed. If the two wana-bee Mercedes technicians involved here had been a little more patient the gummy old four-star causing the blockage to the finely machined valve bodies may have been cleared with some long-term soaking. However, that’s another story.

The confirmed Mercedes buff is well known in the area for his other classics and I feel he will be able to do the car justice. At the moment with our impending move to the other side of the world there is simply too much to contemplate for me to do anything constructive with it. He sounded most pleased to have scored another wreck to put alongside his collection of old Merc’s for doing up and now I don’t have to worry about what will happen to it for even if he does decide to dismantle it, I’ll never know.