Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3, Lamborghini Miura S, Workshop Catchup Part 1 | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

hello and while another Turrell's classic workshop we're going to look at today here in the workshop and see where they're up to we've got some new cars in we're further along with some other projects so it's a sort of round-robin of catching up with various things the first car I want to talk about today is this machine this is a 1969 Mercedes 300 SEL 6.3 Mercedes came up with the s-class this is the very first s-class model or saunder class or superclass or whatever you want to call it which of course they still have to this day it's their top of the range apart from the Maybach brand and this car was a very safe it's the model before it the Finn tail was the first car to have a passenger safety cell a strong sell round the the cabin and this carried that over and a Mercedes was obviously still at the cutting edge of technology which is one of the sort of hallmarks really but the car was very boring in a lot of ways quite ordinary really dare I say it a little too similar to their sort of taxis that they were selling alongside it but a chap called Erik vaccin Berger who was very senior in Mercedes decided to I just do a bit of mischief one day and having the whole of the resources of the experimental Department sort of at his fingertips what he did was and he took an engine from the the big Mercedes the grosser Mercedes as it was called the 600 which was a statement by Mercedes that they could make the best car in the world it was more expensive than a rolls-royce Silver Shadow in the late 1960s but that's not this car they took the engine from the 600 which was a 6.3 liter and that's significant what Erik vaccin Berger did was to track to quietly almost secretly transplant that big engine into this body and that car he sort of rather mischievously left it outside the Mercedes management offices one day and gave the key to one or two crucial people without saying anything to them and they said he said this is a new experimental car please try it and they drove home in it and of course very quickly realized that the performance was out of this world compared to a normal s-class Mercedes cut a long story short the idea stuck and here we are with the 300 SEL 6.3 a great big 6.3 litre fuel injected overhead camshaft lump and what became of that this child that was born out of that sort of bringing together two different things turned out to be the one of the fastest if not the fastest production saloon of its day I mean the figures for a big heavy car in the late 1960s are almost off the chart really naught to 60 in six and a half seconds top speed of just under 140 miles an hour I mean they were incredible figures for a four-door saloon really arguably the sofa do the Italian and four-door saloon and others could beat it because they had big American v8 but I'm not sure in the real world whether they'd have been able to do that or not but the astounding thing about this car is the acceleration it is absolutely amazing and that I've heard stories over the years about Carroll Shelby having races in these along the Strip in Las Vegas against American muscle cars he happened to have access to either one of these or a 600 at any time through mercedes-benz of the USA and he would go drag racing with them but what was it that made this car so very fast because the acceleration the in-gear acceleration of this car is still impressive today and it really is almost neck snapping it's almost like an electric car it's instant and what is the reason for that well it's all to do with something called the fuelling curve modern cars these days with very sophisticated energy management systems have very precisely metered fuel for the amount of air that's going into them and petrol engines in particular extremely fussy about the mixture between air and petrol it has to be exactly the right mixture for them to work properly and diesel engines were far less fussy about things like that and they still are as long as you throw a chunk of diesel in a cylinder and it's sort of doing the right thing at the right time it'll it'll explode and you'll get a you get a bang you'll get a you get a some power out of it petrol is far more fussy this is a fuel injection pump that I had on the shelf and it is out of this there's only one other car it was fitted to and that was the Aston Martin DBS v8 the very very first v8 Aston Martin's from sedan 1969 ish and this pump is a Bosch mechanical injection pump it's called a plunger pump and it was originally a diesel pump as I said diesel engines within reason as long as you give them a shot a diesel though work and petrol is far more fussy so the transformation from diesel to petrol was not as easy as you might think it is and one of the first engines to use this mechanical injection pump which was spawned from a diesel pump was the Dame the Benz 600 series as they were called they were a v12 so this is an eight plunger pump it's got eight outlets because it's a v8 engine they had six and they had two of these on their v12 aero engines and the this particular fuel injection system was first used on the me-109 fighters in the Battle of Britain that sort of lead up to that the Heinkel 8111 used the same inverted v12 so in the 1930s the Germans had these powering their aircraft engines in the war or a very a slightly simplified version of this but not much and this pump here this is a petrol one the diesel one is very similar it's called a plunger pump you've got a shaft running through it here which is driven by this from the engine and it basically pushes plungers up and down inside as it rotates and that determines through this ink thing here called a rack which slides alongside and rotates the plungers that determines how much petrol is injected into the engine and this pump here if I tell you it weighs 10 kilos and the amount of efforts car manufacturers go to you today to shave 10 kilos off anything they will spend millions doing it mercedes-benz had no alternative but to use this and they use it with great success but the thing is it's sort of a blunt instrument it they like running a bit rich they like over fueling a bit and that's why when you snap open the throttle on this car it's not like a modern car where everything is micro managed in terms of the amount of fuel going into the cylinder and the engine management system has to spend however many microseconds catching up with itself when you put the accelerator down on this it just opens all the taps up and off she flies that's why the acceleration is so instantaneous and just one last thing on this when Mercedes launched the w140 as it was called the s-class in 1989 the big boxy one they introduced their first production v12 engine and that when it first came out developed 408 brake horsepower the later versions of that engine because Mercedes wanted to wind back the-- they were prepared to sacrifice a bit of throttle response for drivability and fuel economy the later ones developed 392 brake horsepower because they got rid of the enrichment so what I'm going to do is we've been doing a little bit of work on final detailing and setting up we can't take the credit for this beautiful restoration this was done by a gentleman called Doug Burton who lives in the UK's but is from Zimbabwe originally and he did a lovely job of the car but what we are doing is just doing a bit of fine-tuning and I'm going to road test the car and make sure it's okay well we've done our little adjustments on the fuel injection system and I'm just gonna give her a run and we'll see if we can replicate the sort of instantaneous model response that I'm talking about and the reason I mentioned before that sixty six point three was significant is that mercedes regarded this car are so important in their history it was also one of the first cars that spawned the AMG connection with mercedes when they went racing with these the 6.3 was so important to them that that's I believe that's why lots of AMG current models still used the 6.3 engine size that Mercedes have arrived at that for sort of the emotional impact of this car when it was new and the effect it had because if people wanted a sort of very expensive very uncompromising expressed saloon car around the turn of the 60s 70s this was it and sort of pop stars celebrities all queued up to buy 300sl 6.3 it was quite a game changer in it it really did put Mercedes on the map in a whole new way the car that followed the full 50 L at 450sel 6.9 was a car very much in in a similar vein but this was the one that really started it so we've warmed the engine up now I'm just going to to get into a position where we can open the taps a little bit of course there is a price to pay with a fuel injection system that basically gives the engine what it wants and that is fuel consumption these cars it's a very different world to what it was in 1970 we thought of an economical car then as doing maybe 25 miles to the gallon now that would be considered heresy to most people let alone the electric car users but I imagine I can't say I've proved this but I imagine if you really tried you could get one of these down to single figures in terms of miles per gallon not great but that was that was the world back then fuel was dirt cheap it was before the oil crisis of 1972 1973-74 petrol was or gasoline was still very very cheap yeah she's she's responding really nicely now I think we got a result here here we go [Music] hopefully that was pretty instantaneous throttle response hopefully not communicated in some way I'll just do that again while we've got a straight [Music] that's what you call throttle response and so the modern turbocharged EcoBoost 'add whatever whatever the there is II names that they call them are you just will not get the throttle response like that so this car still thrills even now it's still amazing to drive it's a real wolf in sheep's clothing people would look at this car and never never think that it was capable of performance like that so I think that's a tick I think we have a good result here where we're in good shape and very happy with that [Music] another car that we're going to talk about today is the the yellow Lamborghini Miura which looks a little different to last time we looked at it it's got no suspension on now it's completely stripped down to its bare body so let's take a look at the steps that we're going to be taking next with this well this is the floor of the Miura as I mentioned in the in a previous video when we were looking at the design of the Miura body it is a monocoque it is a one-off unit there's no separate chassis frame but it is made up of lots of sort of pressed sections for ease of manufacture low volume manufacture comparatively in the 60s they had these swaging marks on from new so this is more than likely the original factory floor these rather interesting vents were also factory original they scooped up air underneath the car very primitive form of trying to keep the cabin cool but it worked up into vents that were sort of by your elbow in the center console and really it was a say it was once you're on the move it was very very good this area here has been replaced it's been reworked because this is the original swaging that much chassis used we've got tooling to replicate that but this is not original because that would have had the swaging ribs in it as well so we're going to cut this section out of the floor and have a look see cuz there is some rust in here as well but the basic body is generally in very very good condition it's had a patch welded on here which is not original but we're going to scrape all the under seal off this and make sure that what's underneath is is sound or not sound and then we will send the whole body away to be blasted we were going to try and save the yellow paint if we could that was the plan but on further analysis from we've really inspected it very very thoroughly there's a lot of paintwork that is not factory and it's just slightly different colors and hues here in there so in in consultation with the owner he is most exact that he wants to car repainted and I have to say even though I'm a stickler for originality I agree with him so this is all going to bare metal and we will literally start from scratch to build this up I'm now going to go over to the trim Department and see what Craig's been up to

Channel: Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Views: 158,179

Rating: 4.966661 out of 5

Keywords: Iain Tyrrell, Tyrrell's Classic Workshop, Classic Car Expert, Classic Car Restoration, Classic Car Insights, Classic Cars Cheshire, Lamborghini, miura s, barn find, black forest, mercedes, mercedes-benz, v8, v12, 300 SE L 6.3

Id: vMxXmkpKWY4

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FriedChicken]

This is surprisingly good

[u/dirty_dan12334]

Is this a knock off of Jay Leno’s garage?