Another nice car from that era was the Porsche 944 16 “ventiler”. Ran nice on the track and no turbo to worry about.

What a car it was! The European version had 21hp more than the american 23-16, which means that maybe it wasn’t as fast as tne E30 M3, but had so much to offer. The LSD rear diff, the dogbone getrag transmission, self leveling rear suspension with adjustable ride height from inside (post ‘86 model year) four bucket seats and a glorious engine sound as it hit the rev limiter at 7200rpm.

As for the recirculating ball steering, well it matched the whole experience. The car was not as harsh as the M3, maybe even not as sharp to drive, but it was a true Mercedes nevertheless. The large steering wheel was slow around the center but acurate when it mattered most, close to full lock.

My only regret with this car was its weak timing chain that snapped on me only a few hundered km past its replacement milage. A fact that was confirmed to me by the chief engineering of the project, much latter, in 2006 when I met him on an AMG trip I made during my peak auto-journalism years (he is the same guy who lead the 6.2 AMG V8 project btw). The 2.5-16 had a double chain reinforcement for exactly that reason.

You can still buy the car in Germany today. Some are in great shape. It’s on my list when it turns 30 (i.e. 2016) so that it will be tax exempted here in Greece.

Great car!

On a positive note, she’s only killed one deer since the sticker incident (over a decade ago) so maybe I had an impact.

I still love and miss that car.

Really, when I stop and think about it, the 80s cars I see the most often are Mercedes-Benzes, even in this rust-belt town that I’m in.

http://www.geocities.com/shvoldum/conversions/AMG32.html

Oh, that makes me laugh. Poor woman. Poor deer!

Thanks for that. I came very close to buying a “perfect” 944. I missed my chance, and regretted it for years. I feel better now.

2.3s and 2.6s abound (especially in automatic trim), but you simply can’t find the 16v.

You’re right. The first gen C-class was the beginning of the end for Mercedes quality. The first few model years had catastrophically bad quality. I remember LJK Setright confronting the head of Mercedes at the time in the pages of Car magazine about the issue. The guy said, really? Let me drive your model! He did, and was like all, “Oh shit!”

Then the (then) new E-class came out, whose quality was also so bad that German taxi drivers demonstrated in front of Mercedes headquarters.

It’s been downhill ever since.

The One Lap winning formula is more or less this:

* Get the most horsepower and brake you can.

* Drive the tracks right before the event, in the same car, and load your Traqmate with those runs so you can adjust your pace on-the-fly during the timed sessions.

* Don’t break the car.

* Learn how to bracket-drag.

There’s another way to game the system and become a “One Lap winner”, and I’ll be covering it in my next Capsule Review, which is of our 2006 OLOA car.

oh but there is, some grey scaled BMW logos would look very nice just behind the front fender of that Merc. Is that more or less tacky than sponsor decals?

When I was younger a family member kept taking out deer on upstate roads; we’re talking 6 deer in 3 years. She would claim to be heartbroken by this, but apparently not enough to stop running over the damn things. So, I stole some bambi stickers from the little sister and mounted them just in front of the driver’s side door. No one noticed for three days and it cost me a lot of temporary freedom…but it was worth it. In hindsight I should have waited a few weeks until the car was being daily driven in NYC.

Most people would say that dropping the recirculating ball happened at exactly the same time as the vehicles lost that “engineered like no other car in the world” feel.

The recirculating ball mechanism, at least in my experience, is very slow on center but quickens as you turn farther and farther. At least that is my perception. Perhaps it is that rack and pinion slows down as you turn farther and farther. When switching from my recirculating ball daily driver to a rental car, I have no problems with gradual turns, but I tend to undershoot sharp turns because I don’t realize how much farther I have to turn the wheel.

In addition to the actual mechanics of the mechanisms, most vintage Mercedes are set up with huge steering wheels, require a fair amount of effort to turn the wheel (not much “power” in that power steering), and require lots of turning of the wheel to go “lock to lock.” I think that has much more to do with people’s perception of recirculating ball steering than anything else. I’m currently driving a w202 bodied C43 AMG, which seems quite different from the various w124 bodies I’ve driven extensively, mostly because of the much quicker ratio and smaller wheel. Other than the lack of “power” in the power steering and the non-linear response at wide angles, you would probably not notice a difference.

That fellow traded it in on a Jag XJR to a shop which kind of fixed the rust, put a four-point cage in it and sold it three times to three different owners, all of whom ended up trading it back in on something faster. I don’t know what happened after that.

There wasn’t room in the article, but my 190E wasn’t the only W201 competing in 2005; a group of guys resurrected another 2.3-16 for “The Longest Day” at Nelson Ledges.

The following year, I became involved in a project to build a W201 with an engine transplant from a C36 AMG for NASA’s GTS class. In the end, the costs ran out of hand, so the car got sold and I signed up at the last minute for a season in Leo Capaldi’s #68 Focus.

I shouldn’t have sold the car… because I used the money to buy a “perfect” 944, which has only been “perfect” at draining my wallet.