Silverphile
John Kuhn Bleimaier
The Fin-al Analysis
Have you ever felt misunderstood? Do you know what it’s like to arrive in a new environment and have folks jump to conclusions about you based on a cursory analysis of your appearance? Have people talked about you behind your back and misinterpreted your intentions? If these things have happened to you, you know what it feels like to be a Mercedes-Benz finback in America.
My friends know that I am a finback person. My parents purchased a 190Dc new when I was in high school and I still own that car now. The finback has shaped my automotive psyche and made me the car person that I am today. So deeply has the finback experience seared my persona that I am, no doubt, perceived as being incapable of complete objectivity when I hold forth on the subject of Mercedes-Benz vehicles manufactured between 1959 and 1968. So be it.
For several years now I have been getting a lot of positive attention when I drive my finback down the road. Children wave. Truckers give me the thumbs up. Fellow drivers smile and nod. When I park in town, pedestrians come up and compliment my 46-year-old vehicle. Alas, I am consumed by the conviction that all these well-meaning people are enamored of my finback for the wrong reason. They are oblivious to the fact that this Mercedes model helped introduce front disc brakes, crumple zone safety, overhead camshaft valve actuation, independent rear suspension and the use of aerodynamics for lateral stability at speed.
No, the people who admire my ’65 finback are the same folks who swoon when they see a ’59 Cadillac, a ’60 Chevy, a ’57 Desoto or a ’58 Studebaker Hawk. My happy-go-lucky, unsophisticated countrymen undoubtedly think that the protuberances at the rear end of my motorcar mimic the epennage of an aircraft or the pelican tail of a rocket. They think that this very serious German automotive design is nothing more than a cute reminder of the mid-20th Century American fixation with flight, space travel, UFOs etcetera. No, my 190Dc is not the four-wheeled iteration of a Buck Rogers rocket pistol.
From the time of their introduction in 1959 the Mercedes finbacks have been misunderstood by the American automotive savants, by the people in the car community whom I personally have most admired, and whose aesthetic sensibilities I would most seek to emulate. From my childhood I have looked up to the tweedy, pipe-smoking, string-back driving glove-wearing intellectuals who deftly propel fleet roadsters down autumnal country roads. I share these patricians’ disdain for the garish, chrome-besotted American arks of the ’50s and early ’60s.
Dear reader, can you empathize with my pain when I have been faced with the reality that my automotive aesthetic role models have consistently misapprehended the significance of the Mercedes tailfin? This flourish at the trailing edge of the Sindelfingen boot provided lateral stability at autobahn speeds for cars shod with bias-ply tires. Note the pioneering aerodynamic research conducted by Wunibald Kamm. But, because the German Finback arrived on our shores just at the end of the American automotive rocket ship design heresy, it was mistakenly identified with frivolous trendy-ism. And so it goes.
While I have enjoyed the wonderful driving qualities of the ’65 Mercedes that has resided in my barn for these happy decades, I have yet pined for the respect and longed for the recognition of the Brahmins of the motorcar fraternity. On the way up to Lime Rock my finback and I have played tag with an AC Ace Bristol on winding Route 7 hugging the banks of the Housatonic River in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. We have done a parade lap together on the track at Pocono proceeding between a Facel Vega and a Horch. But my pride and joy is still misunderstood by many whose opinion matters to me. Sometimes I can almost feel the disrespect expressed in the languid glance directed at our fins from under the brim of an elitist Panama hat worn by some stuffed shirt. Oh, the anxiety and alienation.
It’s difficult for me to tell you this, but once in New York City I espied a ‘60s Mercedes four-door sedan that had been mutilated. With apparent skill and obvious premeditation, some chop shop had amputated the tailfins of a 220S sedan. In their place the smooth characterless rump end of a period coupe or cabriolet had been seamlessly grafted on. I still shudder in my inmost being at the recollection.
Sometimes, when I am driving my finback home late at night and there is a pair of headlights persistently present in my rearview mirror, I feel the sensation that someone is following us. It is no treat to find one’s self on a desolate country road on a moonless all-hallows eve. Your mind can begin to play tricks on you. I can almost make out a sepulchral figure in Harris tweed jacket behind the wheel of an Armstrong Siddeley with a pair of tin snippers on his lap.