G enerally speaking, I have an ironclad rule about not buying model cars. I have too many of them and they just gather dust and get in the way. It's a firm policy to try not to look at toy cars when they're available. Unless, you know, it's a car that I actually own in real life, but the miniature has to be exactly the same model and color as mine.
What I do buy – and I admit that it's my kryptonite – is car art. Specifically, I collect paintings and prints by an artist named Dion Pears, who painted in Britain from about 1950 until his death in 1985. Pears painted the golden era of automobile racing from Formula One to Le Mans and the Mille Miglia, and sometimes just captured great cars out on the road.
I have arranged so that when a Dion Pears painting comes up for auction pretty much anywhere in the world, I hear about it. So, when a Pears painting of Rudolf Caracciola driving the Mercedes-Benz SSKL in the 1930 Irish Grand Prix came up at auction recently, I had to have it. The artwork now hangs over my desk for inspiration when I work on The Star.
Great art can transport your mind just about anywhere. In the past year as we saw Mercedes-Benz dominate Grand Prix racing with the most celebrated driver of our time, that painting reminds me that racing has a continuity of spirit even though the technology and the names change. It's about actualizing the ambition to excel that is at the heart of greatness in any endeavor.
In this issue of The Star, you can read about the SSK lineage of cars in detail, and admire a related car that epitomized the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle of the 1930s. We'll also take you to Mexico for a great Mercedes-Benz victory in the heady days of the early 1950s, and we'll introduce you to an MBCA member who's still competing in the same event. Our lead feature and StarTurn also look to the past with some breathtaking member cars preserved from these eras.
All of these stories are designed to help you put your personal Mercedes-Benz in the context of the long history of this renowned marque.
A few weeks after I hung my new painting on the wall, I stopped into the local thrift store and as Shakespeare said, “haply my eye did light upon some toy”. It was a model of Carraciola's SSKL, in white just like he drove it. Of course, buying it would totally violate my rule about model cars. Well OK, it was more of a guideline than a rule, I suppose. And at thrift store prices, it would have been a tragedy to pass it up, right?
That's the story that I keep telling myself, anyway.