Mercedes-Benz W154

Information

This car #10 won the 1939 German GP at Nurburgring driven by Rudolf Caracciola.

Around 1942-1943, before allied bombing campaign shifted into overdrive, Germans decided to secretly move the valuable Silver Arrows far away from potential bombing target areas to save them from destruction.

That is including spare parts, unfinished prototypes and even Stromlinie top speed record breaking cars; usually in pairs per location. They used warehouses or garages of trusted people with ties to the manufacturer.

#10 was paired with another W154 #9 (both fitted with M163 engines) and initially stored somewhere in Lower Silesia in occupied Poland, but later moved into Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. They were stored in a Daimler-Benz airplane engine factory in Stará Paka. If you were wondering why there, of all places things will make more sense when I tell you that the engineer responsible for development of DB cylinder heads there was no other than technical director of the motorsport department at Mercedes-Benz, Rudolf Uhlenhaut.

In May 3rd 1945 among the chaos of local uprising in the region and shortly before the German capitulation a prominent Czech motorbike and car racer Antonín Vitvar discovered both cars. According to some sources he would trade stolen cars during the war as a side job and so it may have come obvious to him to seize the opportunity and take the cars with the help of his friends. They hid one car in his garage in Nová Paka and the other in his sister's barn to keep them from advancing Red Army.

It would turn out to be a very fortunate move, because Soviets liked to confiscate every valuable German asset they could get their hands on and almost all of the similarly hidden Auto Union racers ended up destroyed or cut up during their stay in Soviet Union. That very same fate would meet the other hidden Mercedes-Benz racers in former Czechoslovakia (besides the two survivors in Stará Paka there were also one other W154, a W165 chassis and a W125 Rekordwagen stored not very far away).

Back to the story... When things had finally blown over, Vitvar showed the cars to public and members of the car industry in 1946 and later that year the Car Club of Czechoslovakia sold the other car (#9) to a buyer in UK.

While W154s were still the pinnacle of racecar engineering at the end of WW2, there was not much competitive use for them in Europe anymore as the Grand Prix rules only allowed 1.5 liter supercharged engines. But this didn't apply overseas and so it's logical that it was shortly after sold to America for 25,000$ and raced at Indianapolis. Not without difficulties, mind you. As the team couldn't compare to the factory pre-war effort in specific car knowledge, they ended up seizing the engine at one point and later swapped it with a Jaguar inline six. Thankfully, today the car #9 is restored and reunited with its original engine.

The car #10 later found its way into the National Technical Museum in Prague.

Of fourteen W154 cars built only nine survived and #10 is the only remaining unrestored example with the sole change to the car being a small repair done by the museum fixing a light damage to the front-end it sustained as Vitvar was parking it in his sister's barn back in '45.