MASTER OF THE CLASSICS
After a winning professional racing career, Jochen Mass is now in the driver’s seat of the priceless racing-car collection of the Mercedes-Benz Museum
Article Graham Robson
Images Daimler Archives & Gary Anderson
As it was the morning of last year’s Stars & Cars extravaganza in Stuttgart November 29 (The Star, January-February 2015, p. 10), I might have expected Jochen Mass to be over-stressed and short of time. Not a bit of it. Although he was already kitted out in his vintage racing gear and the sound of high-performance cars – from the 2014 F1 machines all the way back to the pre-1914 GP example that normally lives in the Mercedes-Benz Museum – was booming through the windows, he was clearly happy and ready for the day.
“Well, wouldn’t you be?” he asked. “Today I’m due to drive an SSK, a W25 Silver Arrow, a W125 Silver Arrow, a 300SL, a W196, and to go round the circuit with Sir Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia 300SLR. Oh yes, and I forgot – an up-to-date DTM sedan, too – and anything else I can find time to sample as well. I think it will be the biggest display of Mercedes racecars ever.”
Although his racecar career now covers 40 years “... and counting,” Mass said, he still looks forward to going to the office every time he joins the staff of Mercedes-Benz Classic to demonstrate one of the priceless machines that Michael Bock’s technicians maintain so lovingly. It’s a measure of Mass’s ability that he always looks at home in every car; he can certainly paddle them well.
He’s always correctly dressed too, so that when he appears in a 1930s-type Silver Arrow, his overalls are plain and he’s wearing a linen helmet rather than a crash helmet; in a machine of recent vintage, he never – absolutely never – appears in a short-sleeved shirt. He may have put on a few pounds since last racing a car in anger in 1989 (the year in which he helped win the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Sauber-Mercedes C9), prompting the $50,000 question: Does he ever get a chance to drive the latest F1 cars?
“No way,” came the reply. “I can’t even get into the cockpit of a modern F1 car. Lewis [Hamilton] and Nico [Rosberg] – well, they’re a lot smaller than me. The last modern car I drove was a 1998 Ferrari. Oh, yes, and a 1994 Williams, where everything including the seat had to come out for me to get in.
“Driving all the classic and historic Mercedes-Benz racecars – that all started in the late 1980s when I had a racing contract with Mercedes-Benz, but even before that,” Mass said with a broad grin on his face, “I drove the 1937 W125 Silver Arrow. That was in Australia, before the Grand Prix, and I was asked to drive it in front of everyone – and I had never even sat in it before that.
“That wasn’t easy. First of all, you sat down in it, and there was space, but the pedals were reversed, with the throttle in the middle and the brake pedal on the right – I had to focus on that – then had to learn to drive it. The driving position was more upright, the steering wheel was there (gesturing close to his chest) because it was years before the stretched-out driving positions were even considered. I wasn’t about to try anything rash because I had – still have – too much respect for these cars, their famous history and their value.
“But my first impression – it’s the same on other classics – was that it was endlessly long in front compared to modern racecars that have the engine in the back, and the front stops there (a gesture just ahead of his legs). I got this strange new impression – I turned the wheel, the front of the car went this way or that way, so I followed it rather than leading it. All this I learned on that very first lap in Adelaide.
“Before I started doing this for the company, there had not been one regular ‘classic’ driver – though Emerson Fittipaldi, [Juan Manuel] Fangio and of course Stirling all drove them from time to time – but one had to learn to treat them differently from a modern car, and I think it was clear that I was giving them respect.”
However, he never treated them as old-fashioned toys. “Some of them were so powerful. With the W125, I remember driving it down the pits straight thinking that the clutch was slipping, then finding that the wheels were slipping. On the other hand, the brakes – well, one had to start using them early, and because the tires were so narrow they tended to lock up unless one was gentle with them. Oh, and by the way, tires get very hard when they get old, so the originals made the cars very hard to drive. Fortunately there is a good industry now in Europe and we can get replacements. All this I had to learn – and did.”
As time passes, Mass has had the joy of driving anything – everything, let’s be clear – in the Classic collection, including the London-Brighton Run veterans, the 1908 GP racecars, the huge Benz speed-record cars (with 21.5-liter 4-cylinder engines producing 200 horsepower) and many others. “The problem with the chain-drive Benzes, though, is that you have to take time to change the gears, then make up your mind early about what you are going to do at the next corner,” he said.
To drive these magnificent old machines, one has to learn what they were originally built to do and how they got there – Mass made this point again and again. Only experience – and no one today has as much experience as he does with these cars – and sympathy are good enough to get the best out of them.
Clearly Mass is in love with some of the cars – not just as a ho-hum type of driver, but as someone who feels immensely privileged to be asked to drive them. Of the 1908 Grand Prix (Dieppe) winner, he recalled that the race was a 77-kilometer (478 miles) event on a dirt open-road circuit, that the tires had to be changed often because of rutted conditions, and that they had to refuel several times: Clearly he was in awe of the heroes who averaged more than 70 mph in those conditions. The only regret – and he admitted this with a wry smile – is that he hasn’t driven any of the land-speed-record cars, for today there really is no suitable occasion for them to be exercised.
“But yes, you need a completely different mind-set when driving these cars today. When you climb on board, you have to step back in time. You must remember that each one is power- ful, valuable, technically interesting – just different – and treat it accordingly.”
Jochen Mass
Born in Bavaria in 1946, Jochen Mass – at 68 years old, still Mercedes-Benz’s classic race car demonstrator of choice – has enjoyed a stellar motor sport career. Originally successful in German sedan racing – he won the Belgian Spa 24 Hour race in 1972 in a Ford Capri RS – he then moved up through F2 racing and made his Grand Prix debut in 1973.
During the next decade, he drove for Surtees, McLaren, ATS, Arrows and March, starting no fewer than 105 F1 races before 1982, often finishing on the podium. He won the 1975 Spanish GP in a McLaren-Ford. He also raced sports cars with great success – he won the World Sports Car Championship in 1972 and several races for Porsche in the 1980s, including the Sebring 12 Hour Race in 1987. He then went on to win the most prestigious sports car race of all – the 24 Hours of Le Mans – in 1989, when he was the lead driver in a three-driver team manning the Swiss-built, Mercedes-Benz powered Sauber C9.
After retiring from active competition, he spent five years as an F1 race-car commentator for the German TV station RTL from 1994 to 1998, Since the late 1980s, Mass has been a high-profile demonstrator and driver of the Mercedes-Benz Museum’s priceless collection of historic cars and an occasional driver hired to pilot private owners’ classic cars.
Jochen Mass meets Juan Manual Fangio, who drove the classic museum cars with great joy and skill, as Mass does today.
Mass preparing to take the track in a customer 300SL at the Goodwood Revival, 2013.
One of his many sporting triumphs was to win the 1989 Le Mans 24 Hour race with co-drivers Manuel Reuter and Stanley Dickens in Sauber Mercedes C9 No. 63.
Each of the many classic race cars Mass has driven on behalf of the Mercedes-Benz Museum has left an indelible impression on him. He was astonished by the Blitzen Benz: “Each cylinder of the Blitzen Benz is big as an entire S-Class engine!”
Of the world-beating W125 he comments, “The W125 of 1937 was the first classic Mercedes I ever drove – at the Australian GP in the late 1980s.”
He remains deeply impressed by the W196 R Streamliner and open-wheeler of 1954-1955: “Magic, just magic!
Once I was doing about 168 mph past the pits at Monza in the W196, without a helmet, nothing. Everyone thought I was crazy.”