Re-creating the Record-Setting Blitzen Benz
For the Benz company, the thirst for records in the first decade of the 20th century largely took place in the United States. We can be grateful to Bill Evans of San Diego that one of the three operational 200 PS Benz REs, the one most like the car that took the name “Blitzen Benz,” should live in the U.S.
Above: On the show field at the Dana Point Concours in 2009, the recreation of the original record-setting Type RE Blitzen Benz 200 PS, built by Bob Evans using the original radiator, and a spare engine and frame provided to him by Daimler.
The story started on the sands of Ormond Beach, contiguous with Daytona Beach, in 1906. Victor Hémery showed up there with his Darracq, ready to break records. Unfortunately, a steam car from Newton, Massachusetts, driven by Fred Marriott, blew him and every other manufacturer there for the speed runs, right off the beach. Little consolation that Hémery had tried to blow Marriott off at the start, literally, with a blast of flame from his exhausts.
Failing again at Daytona in March 1909 with a 150-horsepower Benz GP car, Hémery went back to Benz, arguing that a specially designed car, with an enlarged version of the Benz RD engine, could do the trick.
Record-Setting RE
The RE engine, 21.5 liters and the largest Benz ever built, produced 200 horsepower. Ready by August, Fritz Erle tested it first at a speed trial in Frankfurt and then in Semmering.
Above: The 200 horsepower Benz RE engine. The engine in the Evans Blitzen is one of the originals, rebuilt for this car.
This is an original factory image of the engine, hand-tinted by an artist for a brochure apparently intended for use in marketing the 200 PS Blitzen Benz to customers.
A new body, designed by Hémery, Erle, and Hans Nibel, was built for the car to reduce aerodynamic drive. A narrow radiator with a bullet-shaped top tank at the front, a body that wrapped around the drivers’ compartment, and a high bullet tail, gave the car a distinctive look, quite unlike the preceding Grand Prix car.
The controls and few gauges for the driver.
The car had its first chance to really stretch its legs at Brooklands in Surrey, on the purpose-built 2.75-mile banked track that had been completed two years earlier. On November 8, Hémery, in the now white-painted Benz, set record after record at increasing distances, eventually measured at 205.666 km/h (128 mph) on a flying kilometer, giving the car a record that matched the horsepower of its designation as the 200 PS Benz RE, and giving Benz the claim of having built the “fastest car in the world.”
This shot is of the first Benz 200-PS, driven by Fritz Erle, winning at the Frankfurt Speed Trials in 1909 at just under 100 mph in the flying kilometer. (Historic images courtesy of Daimler Archives)
Focusing on the growing market for automobiles in America, Benz shipped the car to New York in January 1910, where it was displayed in the new showrooms of the Benz Auto Import Company on Broadway at 54th Street. However, the car was destined to be much more than a simple display. Before the month was out, it was announced that American driver and promoter Barney Oldfield had traded in his 150 PS Benz, plus a reported $6,000 to take title to the fastest car in the world.
By March, the car, now emblazoned with “Lightning Benz” on the shroud and Oldfield’s name on the tail, was ready to challenge the world again at Ormond/Daytona Beach. It easily eclipsed Marriott’s old record, and beat the Brooklands mark by three miles per hour.
“The fastest mile ever traveled by a human being!” headlined Motor Age. Although the record of 212 km/h was not recognized by the international federation of auto clubs, which required two runs in succession in opposite directions to qualify as a record, the American Automobile Association did recognize the achievement, and Benz soon began to advertise its success in full-page ads.
Oldfield followed the Florida record effort by a season of barnstorming, setting records on fairground dirt tracks across the country, beating local contenders handily, and showing off the power and sound that might have justified a nickname of “Thunder” as easily as “Lightning.”
In one of these races, Ben Kerscher, part of the show and the driver who would lose to Oldfield at each venue, is credited with suggesting a name change. The German connection would be more obvious if the name of the car was changed to the alliterative “Blitzen Benz.”
By the time Oldfield had finished the season, the car was much the worse for wear, with a broken piston and rod, cracked cylinders, and well-worn body panels and paint. Worse, by competing in Mexico, he had aroused the wrath of the AAA, the sanctioning body for American races, and was banned from competition for the following season.
So it was that the following year Oldfield’s traveling road show was bought by an Indianapolis-based syndicate, which engaged former Buick racing-team driver “Wild Bob” Burman to drive the repaired Benz RE in 1911.
On Sunday, April 22, 27-year-old Burman took the car out on the sands at Ormond/Daytona, and before he was done, he had clocked a mile in 25.4 seconds, 141.732 mph, nearly two seconds better than Oldfield’s time from the previous year. The measured kilometer was covered in 15.88 seconds, at 140.865 mph, which would go down in Benz records as the RE’s official top speed.
But the Blitzen Benz was not through. At the owners’ home track of Indianapolis, the day before the 500, Burman would lap the two-mile distance at 74 mph, to be crowned (literally with a crown supplied by tire maker Firestone) as the “Speed King of the World.”
More records would be set at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, at the Minnesota State Fair, and finally in 1912 on a half-mile track at Albany, New York.
By 1923, rebodied and virtually unrecognizable, the car was scrapped in England to re-use its transmission, which would eventually be installed in the English record-setting “Babs,” which has a story all its own.
Re-creating History
San Diego hotelier and automobile enthusiast Bob Evans still has a picture of himself as a young man, standing next to the Mercedes-Benz Museum 200 PS Benz Type RE (see page 41). Evans is an accomplished automobile restorer, with Grand Prix Fiats, an Indianapolis Isotta-Fraschini, and a racing Stutz to his credit, as well as trophies at Pebble Beach.
Evans made his connection to the Mercedes Museum when he sold a 1902 Mercedes Simplex to the museum and then was asked to restore it. The quality of his work gained him the assignment to restore the museum’s Benz RE. The car made its debut at the Goodwood Festival press preview in March 2005.
Part of the arrangement with the company was that the museum would make him a permanent loan of engine 9141, salvaged from the Benz RE that jumped the embankment at Brooklands on a record attempt in 1922 and crashed, as well as a number of original 200 PS chassis components.
Exactly one hundred years after the Frankfurt Trials, a re-creation of the car is displayed and driven at the Dana Point, California, Concours d'elegance.
Evans had been able to acquire the radiator of the original Blitzen (one of the components that was replaced during the time that Burman was driving it). With that iconic piece, Evans determined to re-create the car as it had existed when it had been barnstorming America as the “Blitzen Benz.”
When the recreated Benz RE was shown at Dana Point in 2009, pictured on these pages, it was faithful to the appearance of the car at the time that Barney Oldfield sold it to “Wild Bill” Burman, as shown on the cover of Karl Ludvigsen’s book The Incredible Blitzen Benz. However, we’ve been told that the car is now undergoing a repaint to take it closer to the appearance it had when Burman was barnstorming with it. When we see it again, we may see it with bold stripes on the bonnet and body panels, paralleling the radiator and the chassis rails, and with the much larger German imperial coat of arms that it carried in 1911 and 1912 (see page 33).
Regardless, the impact of this car is not in its appearance. Rather, as anyone who has heard it in motion from 1910 until now, the true effect of this car is felt as much as it is heard, with bystanders once likening it at speed to an 8-inch cannon being fired with every 4.5 feet the car traveled.
We can only be glad that we can share that experience, so much more than just seeing it on display in a museum.
Source
This article is based entirely on information from Karl Ludvigsen’s superb book, The Incredible Blitzen Benz, published by Dalton Watson in 2006. As a reference book on the complicated lives of the various Benz REs, the book would be an achievement, but it is equally desirable for its pictures and layout. The book, highly recommended to any Mercedes-Benz enthusiast, is available at daltonwatson.com for $69.