That Rudolf Caracciola took a Mercedes-Benz to 269 mph is impressive. That he did it in 1938 is remarkable.

The official speed was a two-way average of 268.9 mph. The car was a heavily modified Mercedes-Benz W125 Grand Prix racer; the driver was the 1935 and 1937 European drivers' champion who would clinch an additional title in 1938. That original W125 Rekordwagen is now on static display at the Mercedes factory museum in Stuttgart, but 80 years before, its V-12 engine hurtled a fearless man down a stretch of the A5 autobahn where Germans today commute to Frankfurt.

View Photos Car and Driver

The Rekordwagen is at the museum’s end, banked along a wall, where it leads a procession of experimental racers. Were it not for that familiar star painted on its bare-aluminum body, the Rekordwagen might belong to the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico. Underneath is a W125 Silver Arrow, the same open-wheel Mercedes race car in which Caracciola clinched the 1937 European Grand Prix championship. The specs are unfathomable: a twin-supercharged 5.6-liter V-12 with 725 horsepower, a radiator submerged in 18 cubic feet of ice, and the ability to eat an entire mile in just 13.4 seconds.

On the morning of January 28, 1938, Caracciola and his team were under intense pressure to perform. Three months earlier, the company had promised that the car would crest 249 mph, but Caracciola warned that the rear end felt too light. Later, with lead ballasting the wheels, the engine misfired. A few days before, the front end was lifting. In November 1936, the Mercedes quit after a supercharger died. A month before that, it was gearbox failure. But this being Mercedes—and with the Nazi Party overseeing these record attempts to prove German superiority on its brand-new autobahn—failure was unacceptable.

For the engineers who had spent years refining every last inch of the car, Caracciola’s final world-beating run was unremarkable. It wasn’t so for Bernd Rosemeyer, who was competing with Caracciola for the record; a wind gust tossed his 16-cylinder Auto Union off the road, killing him. Caracciola lived until 1959, two years before East Germany laid the first bricks in the Berlin Wall. The record he set held far longer—nearly 80 years. It was the fastest speed ever reached on a public road, and it remained so until 2017, when Koenigsegg blazed down a closed section of Nevada Route 160 with an Agera RS. With nearly double the power, radial tires, and more electronics than an Apollo spacecraft, it beat the old Benz by 11 mph.



View Photos Car and Driver

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io