Roadster (pronounced rohd-ster)
(1) An
early automobile having an open body, a single seat for two or three persons,
and a large trunk or a rumble seat.
(2) A
horse for riding or driving on the road (archaic).
(3) A
two-seater, convertible sports car.
(4) A sea-going
vessel riding at anchor in a road or bay.
(5) In
coastal navigation, a clumsy vessel that works its way from one anchorage to
another by means of the tides.
(6) A
bicycle, or tricycle, adapted for common roads, rather than for the racing track,
usually of classic style and steel-framed construction (archaic).
(7) Slang
for one who drives much or one who lives along the road (UK (8) archaic).
(8) Slang
for a hunter who keeps to the roads instead of following the hounds across
country (archaic).
(9) The
pre-modern class of racing car most associated with the classic era of the
Indianapolis 500 (1952-1964).
1735–1745:
A compound word, road + -ster.
Road was from the Middle
English rode & rade (ride, journey) from the Old
English rād (riding, hostile
incursion) from the Proto-Germanic raidō
(a ride), from the primitive Indo-European reydh (to
ride). It was cognate with raid, a
doublet acquired from the Scots, and the West Frisian reed (paved trail/road, driveway). The –ster
suffix is applied to someone (or something) associated with an act or
characteristic, or does something specified.
It’s from the Middle English –ster
& -estere from the Old English -estre (-ster, the feminine agent
suffix), from the Proto-Germanic –istrijǭ &, -astrijǭ from the primitive Indo-European
-is-ter- (suffix). It was cognate with the Old High German -astria, the Middle Low German –ester and the Dutch -ster. Roadster is a noun; the noun plural is roadsters.
Roadsters, gullwings and courtesans
1920 Stutz Bearcat (1912-1934 and in the first season spelled Bear Cat). One of the fastest and most admired American cars of the early era, the Stutz Bearcat assumed such a place in popular culture, it was was claimed that should anyone die at the wheel of a Stutz Bearcat, they were granted an obituary in the New York Times (NYT). Wholly apocryphal, the origin of the romantic myth is thought to be related to the Bearcat being a symbol of wealth, adventure, and daring, owned by the sort of chaps (such a lifestyle at the time was most associated with men although women adventurers were not unknown) who would likely anyway warrant an NYT obituary.
In the
United States of the mid-nineteenth century, a roadster was a horse
suitable for travelling and by the early 1900s, the definition had expanded to
include bicycles and tricycles. In 1916,
the US Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE) defined a roadster as "an
open car seating two or three”, a meaning which endures to this day. Despite the origins, use was patchy in the US
with the word applied to vehicles as diverse as the front-engined USAC (Indy) racing
cars of the 1950s, a variety of 1930s convertibles and the custom post-war
creations otherwise known as hot-rods.
Two
of the 1963 Kurtis Kraft Roadsters which ran at the 1963 Indianapolis 500. Car 56 (Jim Hurtubise (1932–1989)) qualified 3rd
(150.257 mph (241.815 km/h)) but retired on lap 102 after suffering an oil leak. Car 75 (Art Malone (1936–2013)) qualified 25th
(148.343 (238.735 km/h)) but retired on lap 18 with clutch failure.
Both
Kurtis Kraft Roadsters used the supercharged, double overhead camshaft (DOHC) Novi
V8 (167–183 cubic inch (2.7–3.0 litres)) which appeared on the Indy 500 grid
between 1941-1966. The Novi was famous
for the howl it produced at full cry but it never achieved its potential
because chassis and tyre technology didn’t advance to the point its prodigious
power could successfully be handled, the adoption of an all-wheel-drive (AWD)
platform (then still referred to as four-wheel-drive (4WD) which now is usually reserved for vehicles which claim some off-road capability) coming too late. The Novi V8 and
is sometimes compared to the 1.5 litre (91 cubic inch) BRM V16, another charismatic,
supercharged, small displacement engine with a narrow power band. The unusual fin on car 75 was an attempt to
improve straight-line stability, an approach often used in the era before the implications of down-force fully were understood.
The
Indy folklore is the adoption of the term “roadster” to describe the final era
of the front-engined cars was the result of an act of subterfuge. What defined the “Indy Roadster” was the engine
and drive shaft being offset from the center-line of the car, something which
allowed the driver to sit lower in the chassis thereby optimizing the weight
distribution for use on (anti-clockwise) oval tracks. It was in 1952 quite an innovation and the legend
is that whenever there were visitors in their workshop, the Kurtis team covered
the chassis with a tarpaulin and if asked, casually dismissed what lay beneath
as “just our roadster” (then a common
term for a “hot rod”, a hobby which became popular in the post-war years). The name stuck when the car appeared, the
design for a decade the dominant configuration in open-wheel oval racing although
the writing was on the wall in 1961 when Jack Brabham (1926–2014) appeared at
the brickyard in an under-powered mid-engined Cooper Climax which, although out-paced
by the roadsters on the straights, posted competitive times because of its
superior speed in the curves. After
that, the end of the roadster era came quickly and by 1965 one could manage to
finish only as high as fifth, the last appearance at Indianapolis coming in
1968 when Jim Hurtubise’s Mallard retired after nine laps with a dropped piston
(something as serious as it sounds).
1954 Jaguar XK120s: Roadster (open two-seater (OTS) in the UK and certain export markets; left) and Drop Head Coupé (DHC; right). The roadsters were lighter and intended as dual-purpose vehicles which could be road-registered, driven to circuits and with relatively few changes be immediately competitive in racing. The DHCs were based on the heavier, more luxuriously trimmed Fixed Head Coupé (FHC) coachwork while the roadsters featured cutaway doors without external handles or side windows and a removable windscreen. Variations on this pre-war pattern was common in the British and parts of the European industry; even the early Chevrolet Corvettes were true roadsters.
In
pre-war Europe (though less so in the UK where “sports-car” or “open two
seater” tended to be preferred), roadsters were often those with most rakish or
flamboyant bodies, offered either by the factory or outside coachbuilders. After the war, the term came to be restricted
to what were once known as sports cars, the smaller, lighter and most overtly
sporty of the line. British
manufacturers also distinguished, within a line of convertible two-seaters
between lightweight roadsters and the more lavishly equipped drop-head coupés
(DHC) which had features such a full-doors and side windows, neither always fitted to roadsters. Interestingly, the early Jaguar
XK120s and 140s (1949-1957) were marketed as open two-seaters (OTS) in UK and
roadsters in the US, the home market not adopting the export nomenclature until
the XK150 in 1958.
300 SL gullwing (1954-1957)Although
the public found them glamorous, the engineers at Mercedes-Benz had never been enamored by the 300 SL’s gullwing doors, regarding them a necessary compromise imposed
by the high side-structure of the spaceframe which supported the body. Indeed, the doors had never been intended for
use on road-cars, appearing first on the original (W194) 300SL, ten of which
were built to contest sports-car racing in 1952. The W194 had a good season, the most famous
victory a 1-2 finish in the 24 Heures du
Mans (24 Hours of Le Mans) and this success, along with the exotic lines,
attracted the interest of the factory’s US importer who guaranteed the sale of
a thousand coupés, essentially underwriting the profitability of full-scale road-car
production. The sales predictions proved
accurate and between 1954-1957, 1400 (W198) 300 SL gullwings were built, some
eighty percent of which were delivered to North American buyers. Curiously, at the time, Mercedes-Benz never publicly
disclosed what the abbreviation "SL" stood for. The assumption had long been it meant Sport Light (Sport Leicht), based
presumably on the SSKL of 1929-1931 (Super
Sport Kurz (short) Leicht) but
the factory documentation for decades used both Sport Leicht and Super
Leicht. It was only in 2017 it published
a 1952 paper discovered in the corporate archive confirming the correct name is Super Leicht.
That
the sales reached the numbers hoped was good because the gullwing was expensive
to produce and a certain volume was required to achieve profitability but by 1956,
sales were falling. At that time the US distributer was suggesting there was greater demand for a convertible so the decision was taken to replace the gullwing with a
roadster, production of which began in 1957, lasting until 1963 by which time
1858 had been built. Now with
conventional front-hinged doors made possible by a re-design of the tubular
frame, the opportunity was taken also to include some improvements, most
notably a more powerful engine and the incorporation of low-pivot swing axles
in the rear suspension. The rear axle changes,
lowering the pivot-point to 87mm (3.4 inches) below the differential centre-line
did reduce the camber changes which could be extreme if cornering was
undertaken in an inexpert manner but the tendency was never entirely
overcome. The swing axles, much
criticized in later years, need to be understood in the context of their times,
the tyres of the 1950s offering nothing like the grip of more modern rubber
although it is remains regrettable the factory didn't, for its high-performance road
cars, adopt the de Dion rear suspension it used on both road and
competition cars during the 1930s. Although
manageable in expert hands, as the Mercedes-Benz Formula One drivers in
1954-1955 proved, the more predictable de Dion would likely have been better
suited to most drivers on the roads. In
fairness, the gullwing’s rear suspension did behave better than many of the more primitive swing-axle
systems used by other manufacturers but it needed to given that in any given
situation, the Mercedes would likely be travelling a deal faster. Remarkably, the Mercedes-Benz swing-axle
arrangement lasted well into the age of the radial-ply tyre, in volume
production until 1972 and used until 1981 on the handful of 600 Grossers
built every year.
Less
costly to build than the gullwing, a few hundred 300 SL roadsters were sold
annually, the price tag reaching even higher in the stratospheric realm. Unlike the lighter gullwing, the emphasis
shifted from a dual-purpose vehicle suited to both road and track to one that
was more of a grand-tourer. The factory
however managed to give the car one last fling at competition.
The SCCA (Sports Car Club of America), tired of the gullwing’s
domination in the production sports car category, changed the rules to render
it uncompetitive and, as the new roadster hadn’t yet achieved the volume needed
to qualify for homologation, Mercedes-Benz built a new model: called the 300
SLS (Super Light Sport), two built to contest the SCCA’s modified production
class. Much lighter, slightly more powerful and with a
few aerodynamic tweaks, the SLS won the trophy.
As a footnote (one to be noted only by the subset of word nerds who delight in the details of nomenclature), for decades, it was said by many, even normally reliable sources, that SL stood for sports Sports Leicht (sports light) and the history of the Mercedes-Benz alphabet soup was such that it could have gone either way (the SSKL (1929) was the Super Sports Kurz (short) Leicht (light) and from the 1950s on, for the SL, even the factory variously used Sports Leicht and Super Leicht. It was only in 2017 it published a 1952 paper (unearthed from the corporate archive) confirming the correct abbreviation is Super Leicht. Sports Leicht Rennsport (Sport Light Racing) seems to be used for the the SLRs because they were built as pure race cars, the W198 and later SLs being road cars but there are references also to Super Leicht Rennsport. By implication, that would suggest the original 300SL (the 1951 W194) should have been a Sport Leicht because it was built only for competition but given the relevant document dates from 1952, it must have been a reference to the W194 which is thus also a Sport Leicht. Further to muddy the waters, in 1957 the two lightweight cars based on the new 300 SL Roadster (1957-1963) for use in US road racing were (at the time) designated 300 SLS (Sports Leicht Sport), the occasional reference (in translation) as "Sports Light Special" not supported by any evidence. The best quirk of the SLS tale however is the machine which inspired the model was a one-off race-car built by Californian coachbuilder ("body-man" in the vernacular of the West Coast hot rod community) Chuck Porter (1915-1982). Porter's SLS was built on the space-fame of a wrecked 300 SL gullwing (purchased for a reputed US$500) and followed the lines of the 300 SLR roadsters as closely as the W198 frame (taller than that of the W196S) allowed. Although it was never an "official" designation, Porter referred to his creation as SL-S, the appended "S" standing for "scrap".
Job
done, the factory withdrew from circuit racing although private teams
would continue to campaign 300 SLs into the 1970s.
The road-going version continued with little visual change until 1963
although the engineering refinements continued as running changes, disk brakes
adopted in 1961, the last few dozen built with a lighter aluminum engine
block replacing the cast-iron casting.
When retired, it wasn’t replaced, the W113 (pagoda) and their successors
(R107) roadsters a different interpretation of the genre. It would be decades before Mercedes-Benz
would again offer anything like the 300 SL.
190 SL (1955-1963)The
reception afforded the 300 SL prompted the US distributor to suggest a lower
cost sports car would also be well-received.
The economics of that dictated the exotic features of the gullwing
(dry-sump lubrication, the doors, fuel-injection) couldn’t be used so the
factory instead grafted attractive roadster coachwork atop a shortened saloon car
platform, the pedestrian four-cylinder engine barely more powerful than when
found in its prosaic donor. Still,
the 190 SL (W121) looked the part and could be sold for well under half the
price of a gullwing though even then it was hardly cheap, costing a third more
than a Chevrolet Corvette and by then the Corvette had been transformed into a most estimable roadster with the addition of the new Chevrolet 265 cubic inch (4.3 litre) small-block V8. Pleasingly
profitable, nearly twenty-six thousand 190 SLs were built over an eight-year run
beginning in 1955 and there were even plans for a 220 SL, using the 2.2 litre (134 cubic inch) straight-six from the “pontoon” saloon range (W120-121-105-128-180; 1953-1963) which had provided the roadster's platform.
Prototypes were built and testing confirmed they were production-ready but the continuing success of the 190 SL and
capacity constraints first postponed and finally doomed the project. After production ceased in 1962 (none were
built in 1963 but the factory listed the final 104 cars as 1963 models), it
wouldn’t be until the 1990s that the concept of a smaller roadster (the R170 SLK)
to run alongside the (R129) SL was revived although, since the early 1970s, the
SL (R107) had simultaneously been available with engines of different sizes and accordingly placed
price-points.
Though
never designed with competition in mind, the factory did construct half a dozen
higher-performance Rennsport (motor-racing) packages (referred to internally as the 190 SLR), the most important aspect
of which was diet, the weight-reduction achieved with aluminium doors, a smaller Perspex windscreen
and the deletion of non-essential items such as the soft top, sound insulation, the heater (they're surprisingly weighty devices) and bumpers. Although never part of a major racing campaign, it did enjoy success including a class win in a sports car event at Morocco and victory in the 1957 Macau Grand Prix.
Last of the Adenauers: 300d (W189, 1957-1962) Cabriolet D (upper) & the "standard" 300d saloon (four-door hardtop).Although
some of its customers during the mid-twentieth-century (notably between 1933-1945) are understandably
neglected in their otherwise comprehensive attention to history, Mercedes-Benz
has always acknowledged and publicized the drivers and clients of the 1950s. Their Formula One drivers (especially Juan Manuel Fangio (1911–1995) & Stirling Moss (1929–2020) were honored for decades after their retirements and Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor
of the Federal Republic, was even afforded the unique
distinction of being the nickname for the 300 (W186 & W189, 1951-1962), the big limousine
of the era which used a substantially similar engine to the 300 SL's unit. Note that although the top image is of a convertible, it's a "cabriolet" and not a roadster. According to Mercedes-Benz, a roadster is a two door, two seater convertible although, since the 1960s, the factory has sometimes offered the option of single (transverse) or conventional rear seat for occasional (and sometimes uncomfortable) use. Small, these seats were really suitable only for very young children and no pretence was made that they make a roadster into a true four-seater, 2+2 the usual (generous) description. Being Germans, during the 1930s, Daimler-Benz decided there were sufficient detail differences between the coachwork and hood (in the sense of folding roof) assemblies offered and formalized definitions of five distinct flavors of Mercedes-Benz cabriolets.
However, in a fate shared with some of the most valued clients of the three-pointed star between 1933-1945, nor does the factory’s historic literature dwell on someone perhaps the 190SL’s best known owners, Rosemarie Nitribitt (1933-1957). Fraulein Nitribitt was, by 1957, Frankfurt’s
most illustrious (and reputedly most expensive) prostitute, a profession to
which she seems to have been drawn by necessity but at which she proved more than proficient and, as the reports of the time attest, there was nothing furtive in the
way she practiced her trade. Something
of a celebrity in Frankfurt, the republic’s financial centre, her black roadster
became so associated with her business model that the 190SL was at the time often referred
to as the “Nitribitt-Mercedes”, her car seen frequently, if briefly, parked in
the forecourts of the city’s better hotels. Unlike the contemporary connection with Herr Adenauer, the factory never acknowledged this nickname.
190 SL sales breakdownThe lives
of prostitutes, even the more highly priced, can descend to their conclusion
along a Hobbesian path and in 1957, aged twenty-four, she was murdered in her smart
apartment, strangled with a silk stocking, the body not found for several days. Given Fraulein Nitribitt operated at the
upper end of the market, her clients tended variously to be rich, famous &
powerful and that attracted the raft of inevitable conspiracy theories there
had been a cover-up to protect their interests, a rather botched police
investigation encouraging such rumors.
The murder remains unsolved. It has been suggested sales of the 190 SL suffered because of the connection, the little roadster briefly attracting the moniker “whore’s taxi” and indeed, there was a decline in the period. However,
1956 was the first year of full-production and a second-year drop-off in sales is
not unknown, gullwing production for example dropped to 308 in 1956, quite a fall from the 855 achieved the previous year and while, at least in Germany, the association with the dead courtesan
may have been off-putting for the bourgeoise, without qualitative data, one really can’t say. There was a precipitous decline in 1958 but
that was the year of the worst US recession of the post-war boom and it was in the US most of
the drop was booked; sales anyway quickly
recovered on both sides of the Atlantic.
Frankfurt police officers examining Helga Matura's 220 SE cabriolet (
Hōchkühler). Note the jackboots.
In a coincidence
of circumstances, a decade later, Fraulein Helga Sofie Matura (1933-1966) was another high-end prostitute murdered in Frankfurt, the weapon this time a stiletto (the stylish shoe rather than the slender blade). Never subject to the same rumors the
Nitribtt case attracted, it too remains unsolved.
In another coincidence, Fraulein Matura’s car was a convertible Mercedes,
a white (W111) 220 SE Cabriolet. Despite
the connection, the W111 never picked up any prurient nicknames and nor did its reputation suffer, the most valuable of the W111 cabriolets now attracting prices in excess of US$400,000 for original or fully-restored examples while German turning houses which update the drive-trains to modern standards list them at twice that.
Helga Matura (1966) by Gerhard Richter
Gerhard
Richter (b 1932) is a German visual artist whose work encompasses glass as
well as aspects of both photography and painting. Although most noted for working in illusionistic
space, some of his output has belonged to various schools of realism and he seems
to place himself in many of the traditions of modernism, acknowledging surrealism,
the primacy of the object and the purpose of art. Of particular interest was his 1988 series of
fifteen photo-paintings (18 October 1977)
depicting four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) (better, if a little
misleadingly, known in the English-speaking world as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). Created using monochrome photographs taken
mostly before their deaths, the work was an interesting exploration of time, meaning
and form.
His
portrait of the late Helga Matura is representative of his technique in photo-paintings,
applying the practices of the Fluxus movement to material not originally
created as art. Blurred and variously in
and out of focus, it takes the entirely representational image of a photograph
which is then disrupted; disruptions may be for the purposes of the artist, the
subject or the viewer and indeed time, the nature of the work changing whether
viewed with or without knowledge of her life and death.
Roadster off the road, California, 2005.
In October 2005, Lindsay Lohan went for a drive in her Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG roadster. It didn’t end well. Based on the R230 (2001-2011) platform, the SL 65 AMG was produced between 2004-2012, all versions rated in excess of 600 horsepower, something perhaps not a wise choice for someone with no background handling such machinery though it could have been worse, the factory building 400 (175 for the US market, 225 for the RoW (rest of the world)) of the even more powerful SL 65 Black Series, the third occasion an SL was offered without a soft-top and the second time one had been configured with a permanent fixed-roof. A production number of 350 is sometimes quoted but those maintaining registers insist it was 400.
Roadster back on the road, Texas, 2007.
By 2007, the car (still with California registration plates (5LZF057) attached) had been repaired, detailed & simonized and was being offered for sale in Texas, the odometer said to read 6207 miles (9989 km). Bidding was said to be “healthy” so it was thought all's well that ends well but once the vehicle's provenance was brought to the attention of the repair shop, it was realized the celebrity connection might increase its value so it was advertised on eBay with more detail, including the inevitable click-bait of LiLo photographs. However, either eBay doesn't approve of commerce profiting from the vicissitudes suffered by Hollywood starlets or they'd received a C&D (cease & desist) letter from someone's lawyers and the auction ended prematurely. It proved a brief respite, the SL 65 soon back on eBay Motors but with the offending part of the blurb limited to "previously owned by high profile celebrity", leaving it to prospective buyers to join the dots. According to Business Insider, the car sold for US$111,000 which was much higher than would be expected for one which had been repaired after an accident, albeit it a low-speed impact. The R230s anyway had a complex construction and the AMG versions added even more intricacy so although it is possible to restore a damaged AMG to the state in which it left the factory, it does require both expertise and some often expensive parts. Because of that, repaired Mercedes-Benz AMG cars trade usually at a significant discount so the amount realized was indicative of the perceived value of a celebrity association.
