Fast beautiful dangerous Mercedes CLR racecar

The story behind Fast beautiful dangerous Mercedes CLR racecar

Same year he painted a BMX race specifically to avoid the chrome-engine crowd. Here is a silver racing car.

In his defence, it’s not just any racing car. Bert Ernie will tell you the Mercedes CLR is the most beautiful race car ever designed, and he doesn’t say it lightly. It grew out of the CLK LM and pushed everything purposeful about that car a step further. Before the CLR turned up at the start of the 1999 season, the top spot belonged to the Maserati 250F. The CLR took it and has kept it ever since.

The source photo came from a Racecar Engineering article working through why the car kept leaving the ground at Le Mans that year. Three times, in fact. The picture is from before any of that, sitting in pit lane with drivers, mechanics and officials milling around it. Most car paintings would have cleared all those people out and left the car shining on its own. He left them in, because they were there.

Painting the thing was hard work. The body is nothing but compound curves, every one of them catching light from a different direction. He picked it partly for that reason, which says something about him.

How did it go? Reasonably well. The car holds up. The curves read as curves, the light sits on the bodywork about where it should, and the stance is right. The crowd is rougher. Faces get simpler the further back you go, and a couple of the men up front look like they’ve been painted from memory by someone who met them once. Next to his later realism it’s a bit crude. Next to the photo he had to work from, it’s a fair effort.

The title needed no thought. Fast, beautiful, dangerous. Le Mans settled the last one.

Apparently only two of the cars survive.

Source image: Racecar Engineering

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