This week on Jay Leno’s Garage, the four-wheeled star is a replica 1950 Mercedes-Benz race car transporter, a properly stunning piece of sheet metal. Those lovely swooping lines, that incredible cab-forward overhang, the overall sleekness of design; this is a vehicle that will give you a visceral tingling on sight. And, for about 13 minutes in the video below, that lustful feeling goes strong—until everything comes to a (literal) screeching halt. When Leno and his crew try to show us how to offload a car—a 300SL Gullwing, in this case—they scrape the absolute bejesus out of the bottom. It was bad enough to make seven staffers gathered around a monitor in our office let out a collective gasp.

More on that in a second. First, let’s talk about that beaut of a truck. Back in the ‘50s, ze Germans hated fixing their race-bombs trackside, instead preferring to wrench the cars back at the factory—which was close enough given that the bulk of racing was going down in England, Germany, France, and Spain. To ferry the four-wheeled patients to the operating room required the quickest ambulance ever. Thus, Mercedes built the world’s fastest transporter, fitted with that prodigious 6-cylinder, fuel-injected 300SL engine—the very same powerplant found in many of the cars catching a ride on the back. It had a top speed of 108 mph and would drive full-tilt straight through the night to the factory, then turn around and return the car for the race the next day. It was an incredible machine, and there was but one of them, so imagine the outcry when it was crushed in 1967.