Video: Hamilton’s McLaren in hall of fame
Lewis Hamilton had a timely reminder that McLaren can build good cars when he was re-acquainted with his world championship-winning 2008 McLaren MP4-23 recently.
An example of the car was being added to Mercedes’ museum in Stuttgart, joining other great race and championship winning machines. Here’s a video of the car arriving including an interview with Hamilton:
Interestingly, the narrator repeats the story that the original Mercedes raced in silver because of a last-ditch effort to save weight ahead of their 1934 debut, which led the them scraping the white paint off the cars revealing the aluminium beneath.
Eberhard Reuss challenged this version of events last year in his engrossing book, “Hitler’s motor racing battles”:
The apparently ‘new’ German racing colour of silver was not new and had in fact become a familiar sight to the press and public since the very first test-drives of the new national racing cars. Consequently it was not considered worthy of special mention.
The colour of Hamilton’s car is surely of rather less concern to him than how well it goes. Still it’s fascinating to reflect that the same company whose first racing efforts 75 years ago were bankrolled by the repugnantly racist Nazi party last year helped make a mixed-race driver world champion.
Why is the guy from Masterchef in this video?
Wow it is isn’t it!
for those that watch it, he should be shouting “car building doesnt get tougher than this…”!!
HAHA
Is it just me or did the voice over sound like he was ready to burst out and tell me about “Just for Men“?
I also like how they avoided using any archive F1 footage…
The Mercedes museum in Stuttgart is a fascinating place to go if you ever get the chance, definitely worth a visit!
“hhhwan manuel fangio”
he doesn’t sound spanish to me…
The official racing color for Germany is white. BMW and Porsche still use white. There must be some reason Mercedes and “Audi” swapped to bare metal.
The story that they had to do so because on scrutineering day the car was overweight sounds silly though. They would have known before.
Indeed I have seen a picture of a 1932 Mercedes which also was unpainted.
I’d go with the theory that silver is just a great paint scheme when done right, like on the current McLarens.
Nice. I must try get to the museum next time I’m in Germany…