In the course of writing this blog, we seldom come across opportunities to cover foreign-made automobiles. It could be that our audience is much more geared toward American classics. When you look at the cars that are consigned to us each year, native brands are the overwhelming majority. This could be due to anything from regional tastes to sheer logistics. Whatever the case, we certainly don’t mind branching out.
“Drive tastefully,” says Petrolicious, a classic car creative collective that produces short films and articles for fellow enthusiasts. It just doesn’t do to call their work videos, not when they are so lovingly crafted. The Petrolicious crew treats cars as art, and that is how you have to approach their offerings.
This film, titled “Bulletproof Beauty,” features Bernard Bredehorn who tells us about his 1972 Mercedes-Benz 280S/8. This is a car designed by Paul Bracq that was meant to usher Mercedes out of its own dark age, an era where the brand’s reputation had faltered and become tarnished by weak design and weaker mechanical execution.
Speaking softly in German, Bredehorn talks about his fond memories with his grandparents’ 280SE, a car that preceded the world famous S-Class. His car was long overdue for restoration, sitting in his friend’s garage. Once he finally got around to fixing it up, he had to hurry to finish before the onset of winter and the birth of his first child.
Now it is restored and its M110 inline-six engine runs as well as it did forty years ago. These are the kinds of cars that established the ethos of German reliability, so you really have to hand it to people like Bracq for saving Mercedes-Benz, as well as people like Bredehorn for sharing his experience.
Winter is drawing to a close, and before you know it the next edition of the Raleigh Classic Car Auction will be here. Have you registered yet?