Stamps, then. The last time I dabbled seriously in stamp culture was in elementary school. I had stamp books aplenty. The family bathroom would be hijacked for hours as I placed slightly wet sponges on letters and postcards my family had received and stashed over the decades. Traveling one square inch at a time. To the Cayman Islands, to Ghana, to Botswana. To wherever.

Formula One back then was epic and brutal battles between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, riding their McLaren–Honda MP4/4’s to victory in 15 out of 16 races, faltering only in the House of Ferrari one month after Enzo’s death at the age of 90. I did not follow Formula One back then. Sauropods and the woodlouse Porcellio scaber were infinitely more interesting.

Nineteen years later, Royal Mail—the postal service of the United Kingdom—issued a set of six stamps commemorating Britain’s Formula One greats. It was the summer of 2007 and Britain had already given the world eight world champions, more than any other nation. Lewis Hamilton would eventually become #9, but not in his rookie year of 2007, oh no. In his rookie year, he was so busy trying not to beat but to bloody vanquish his teammate Fernando Alonso at the penultimate race in Brazil that he handed the championship to Kimi Räikkönen. This was back when, unlikely as it may sound today, Stirling Moss called him a humble young man, reminiscent of his 50s teammate at Mercedes-Benz, five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio.

Sir Stirling, of course, never won the world championship. Still, and in a manner that would be impossible to defend by statistics or rationale, he is the greatest Grand Prix driver the United Kingdom has ever produced. You may wonder why, when British racers who have won world championships include:

1. Graham Hill, who won thrice, and wore the coolest mustache this side of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
2. James Hunt, who has video evidence proving him to be the coolest man who has ever existed. Plus, he used to attend official functions in jeans and sans shoes
3. Jim Clark, who was Luke Skywalker disguised as a sheep farmer
4. Jackie Stewart, who, if mathematically possible, is even cooler than Hunt

And so on.

But then study this photo of Sir Stirling driving the stuff of legend beside Denis Jenkinson in the 1955 Mille Miglia. Study it carefully. Zoom in if necessary:

That’s settled then, isn’t it? As expected, the stamp collection is rather heavy on Moss. Here's what you get when you unfold the complete set:

Six stamps, eight British world champions at the time of publication, plus Moss. So who got the axe? Mike Hawthorn, Le Mans champion and the first Brit to win the Formula One world championship. John Surtees, the only man who have became world champion on both motorcycles and in F1 cars. Oh, and Damon Hill—but then he makes people throw up.

Not exactly slim pickings.

And why? There is no why. At least Royal Mail has no why. Mysterious are the ways of philately.

Photo Credit: Lothar Spurzem (Graham Hill), Daimler Media Services (Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson), Royal Mail and the author. Special thanks to Lili Mesterhazy for the stamps and the postcards.

Like all great stories in motor racing, Mercedes’s dominating debut is a story of timing, innovation and resurgence, with a healthy sprinkling of treachery on top. It began on a November day in 1953.

It was at the conclusion of the fourth season of Formula One, a mere eight years after the war situation in Europe had developed not necessarily to Germany’s advantage. Dominated by Alberto Ascari in his tiny Ferrari 500, the young sport was about to go through its third major rule change in four years: the 1954 season would drop the Formula Two regulations in place for 1952 and 1953 and dictate a maximum displacement of 750 cc for supercharged engines and 2,500 cc for naturally aspirated ones.

Mercedes-Benz, on the heels of their successful victory with the 300SL Gullwing in the Carrera Panamericana, decided to enter Formula One. The old team which ruled the European Grand Prix Championship with the supercharged Silver Arrows was back. Team manager Alfred Neubauer—the man who invented pit signaling—returned with his hat, trenchcoat and stopwatches, while London-born technical director Rudolf Uhlenhaut was tasked with creating a new car from scratch, codenamed W196 R.

And what a car it turned out to be! The engine a straight-eight, fuel-injected, naturally aspirated 2.5-liter marvel, with power taken off at the middle of the crankshaft, running on a cocktail of benzol, methylene, gasoline, acetone and nitro. It was driven by desmodromic valves—only seen today on Ducati motorcycles—which enabled higher revs than allowed by 1950s springs. The whole assembly was canted 37º to the right to make for a lower hoodline and a smaller frontal area. The car was wrapped in sheets of Elektron, an ultralight and very flammable alloy of magnesium.

By the time Uhlenhaut’s team was done, the 1954 season was already underway, with Juan Manuel Fangio racking up wins in the brand-new Maserati 250F. But the lure of the new Mercedes proved too hard to resist for the Argentine, and after winning two of the season’s first three Grands Prix, Fangio swapped his Maserati for a seat in the W196. After a 15-year absence, the stage was set for Mercedes-Benz’s debut on July 4 at the French Grand Prix, held at the ultra-fast circuit of Reims-Gueux.

Tweaking and testing continued even after Fangio and teammate Karl Kling—who had taken a vulture through the windshield of his 300SL Gullwing two years before in Mexico at 130 MPH—secured the first two positions in qualifying. Fuel consumption was higher than expected, and in a wonderful move, technical director Uhlenhaut hopped in his own Gullwing and raced it all the way to team headquarters in Stuttgart to have expanded fuel tanks manufactured overnight for the W196’s. No vultures were encountered on the Autobahn and at 2:45 the next afternoon, off went Fangio and Kling to begin the 300-mile race.

It was a massacre. The streamlined cars outpaced the rest of the field by 4 seconds a lap. As Fangio took the checkered flag half a car length ahead of Kling, they were the only two cars on the leading lap. Two Maseratis, two Ferraris and a lone Gordini driven by Jean Behra limped in long after them, the rest of the field decimated in the grueling race.

Incidentally, it was on this very day that Germany’s national squad beat what was perhaps the greatest football team ever in the finals of the 1954 World Cup: the Hungarian Aranycsapat, stopped in its tracks after an unbroken string of 33 wins.

The W196 would go on to win 8 of the next 11 races it was entered in. The streamlined body was replaced with an open-wheel version for the more technical circuits, and a young Stirling Moss joined Fangio for the 1955 season.

Mercedes-Benz also entered the car in sports car racing as the 300SLR, with an engine bored out to 3 liters, producing 300 HP. This was the car that carried Stirling Moss to his famous victory in the Mille Miglia—and which, a few weeks later, got catapulted into the crowd at Le Mans, where it became all too clear just how flammable that Elektron chassis was. Over eighty people perished in the flames, including racing driver Pierre Levegh.

The accident spelled the end of the W196 and its brethren. Neubauer withdrew the 300SLR’s from the lead several hours after the accident. At the end of the season, with Fangio claiming the Formula One World Championship in the W196 and the team taking the World Sportscar Championship in the 300SLR, Mercedes-Benz withdrew completely from motor racing.

Fangio would become World Champion two more times. His victories came in cars he had defeated in his Mercedes: the Lancia-Ferrari D50, and for his final championship in 1957, the very Maserati 250F he had abandoned three years previously for the W196.

The 300SLR lived on as Rudolf Uhlenhaut’s daily driver. It was made into a street-legal coupé which Uhlenhaut commuted to work with.

A hyper-Gullwing, capable of reaching speeds of 180 MPH in a sad, gray, post-war Europe, blasting down empty highways at warp speed, forever chasing a racetrack it would never set wheels on again.

On the other hand, it must have made for a memorable childhood for Uhlenhaut’s son Roger:

Photo Credit: Daimler AG, Autocar

In the history of motorsports, there are very few races as historically fit-inducing as Italy's Mille Miglia. Blah, blah, blah, ack, ack, ack, ran from '27 to '57, minus the war years, spectators died, Stirling Moss drove that one Mercedes, it's a historic rally now etc. You know the drill. Regardless, it does not take away from the sheer stupendosity of the machinery that participates in today's event, nor does it dim the beauty of the Italian countryside one iota. Check out the flickr pool and spend a few minutes being astonished. – Davey G. Johnson

Mille Miglia Photo Pool [flickr]

Related:
Arrivederci, Miglia Mercedes: Record-Setting 300SLR Makes Final Apparance in Italy Race [Internal]

Introduced to the world for the 1936 Olympics, the BMW 328 was an (almost) instant classic that went on to dominate the world of motor racing for the next half-decade. But like the "in your face, master race" that Jesse Owens gave Hitler and friends by winning four gold track & field medals, the 328 harbored an un-Aryan secret; it was designed by a Jew. The gorgeous 328 was in fact designed by Kurt Joachimson, a Hebrew brother from another mother who had created the first sporting BMW, the 315/1 Roadster. Credit for the 328's sporting lines went to a man who wasn't hired by the Bavarian Motorwerks until after the 328 went out of production (and other times wrongly attributed to Fritz Fiedler — only it wasn't Fritz). Despite the ugly history, the 328 is one of the most beautiful and important vehicles ever conceived and executed. More after the jump.

Hyper-advanced for its time and unbeatable on the track, the 328 featured innovations such as independent front suspension, a tight and light body that fully covered the chassis/mechanicals and headlights which were integrated into the front metal for better aerodynamics. All this techie-kit would have been less meaningful without some power. The horses were derived from the 2.0-Liter straight-6 that powered the earlier 327, only with improved breathing. These engineering advances allowed the hot-looking 328 to dominate racing in the late 1930s, including an overall win at the Mille Miglia (in the light-weight aluminum/magnesium bodied 328 Mille Miglia Coupe pictured above) with an average lap speed of 103.4mph and a top speed of 139mph! Considered by many to be the first modern sports car, we just totally, totally want one. – Jonny Lieberman

Related:
BMW Unveils Mille Miglia Concept Coupe; More: Know Thy Germans (Because We Don't): Mystery BMW Stumps Jalopnik; More: Know Thy Germans: The BMW 502 [Internal]

Watchers of vintage races and rallies know this week starts one of the majors on the docket: the Mille Miglia, an annual run across Italy by various enthusiasts, viscounts and gearheads in every manner of racer. This year, BMW's honoring one of the cars it ran successfully in 1940 — the 328 Mille Miglia Touring Coupe, which set a speed record that still stands — by creating a retro-themed concept car on the bones of the new Z4 M Coupe. The streamlined Mille Miglia Concept Coupe recalls the original, though as a Chris Bangle interpretation. That means the concept, which rides on a lengthened version of BMW's current M Coupe — and is powered by the same 3.2-liter six — is adorned with a clash of surfaces and fins in place of the flowing lines of the 1940 car. Expect a public showing when the race starts later this week.

Related:
Mini Traveller: Concept Detroit; BMW Introduces Racing Coupe [internal]