The genius of Mercedes designer Rudolf Uhlenhaut

The man who would be Kling… Oct 1997

In 2025 a Mercedes-powered Formula 1 car rules the roost, and 70 years ago it was a similar story. Mercedes made its grand prix supremacy official when Juan Manuel Fangio secured the 1955 world title with a win at the Italian GP season finale.

In that golden era Fangio, Stirling Moss and Karl Kling took the podium plaudits, but it was Mercedes’ genius designer Rudolf Uhlenhaut who supplied the winning cars – and he could drive them at full tilt too.

Chris Nixon’s October 1997 piece The man who would be Kling… focuses on an individual who was arguably the single-most important element of the Silver Arrows’ pre and post-war success, but received relatively little credit compared to men behind the wheel or its powerhouse team boss Alfred Neubauer.

Ironically, Uhlenhaut was born in London in 1906 (his father ran Deutsche Bank’s London branch) before moving to Bremen aged eight. He joined Mercedes in 1931, and was drafted into its race department following a trouncing by Auto Union in 1936.

“The problem was that Mercedes had nobody in the racing department who could drive the cars,” Uhlenhaut said. “They had to rely on what the racing drivers said and they had no technical knowledge. The department was reorganised and I was put in charge.”

Days later Uhlenhaut was tearing round the 17.6-mile Nürburgring in a Mercedes grand prix car while the drivers were off at the actual races. “I found out that driving a racing car was not much different from a passenger car at high speed,” he remarked.

Identifying a chassis that flexed combined with a ride that was too stiff, Uhlenhaut remedied the situation with the W125, which dominated the 1937 European Championship. Its W154 successor did the same in 1938, before the German spent WWII designing cylinder heads for Daimler-Benz’s 603 aircraft engine.

By the early ’50s he was back designing Merc winners. His 300 SL W194 gullwing claimed a Le Mans win in ’52 in the hands of Lang and Fritz Reiss, while Fangio brought back-to-back F1 world titles with the W196.

“A lovely man,” commented Moss of Uhlenhaut. “A very happy, very human individual.” And one with serious talent too.

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