The dapper Uhlenhaut sits on the doorsill of a Mercedes-Benz 300SL coupe sports racer (W194) on Stuttgart’s Rotenberg during the summer of 1953.
You wouldn’t need all the fingers of one hand to count the number of men who could beat Juan Manuel Fangio around the daunting Nordschleife of the Nürburgring, but one of them was certainly a suave German named Rudolf Uhlenhaut. Strangely, he wasn’t a racing driver at all but a hyper-talented engineer who taught himself to drive state-of-the-art racing cars like the professionals. Not in the way that racing drivers of his day graduated through the lower ranks of their sport – motorcycles, saloon cars, grand tourers and so on – to the pinnacle of Formula One. Uhlenhaut, who never actually owned a car in his life, started from zero and taught himself.
One day in 1936, he stepped out of his company car at the ’Ring and clambered into a 354-hp, 8-cylinder full-blown Mercedes-Benz W25 Grand Prix racer and began. Slowly at first. It took him several thousand miles of tearing around the formidable circuit in such screaming monsters before he eventually became as fast as his professional drivers—faster in some cases.
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