Looking like a more polished Bricklin, the Mercedes C111 could blow the gullwing doors right off one regardless of which powertrain it has installed.
If I blew one winter tire per season, I’d probably become a pedestrian, but I remember sled engines blowing up being expected and not really a big deal. I only ever ran the piston variety, but some of them came equipped with rotary engines, as well. Not unlike a two-cycle piston engine, rotary units also love to have fuel thrown at them. They run rich, meaning the emissions are off the charts, and you’d better be rich if you plan on feeding them all that high octane fuel. Why high octane? They need it to avoid detonation. When a piston engine detonates due to pre-ignition and knocks, it’s bad, but it probably isn’t the end. It’s just a shockwave of high cylinder pressure going through all the moving parts. In a rotary, it’s essentially one knock, and it’s over. It usually cracks the apex seals, lowering compression and sometimes shedding a piece of the seal, which tears up the internals. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, just a portion of a seal, but keep in mind a rotary engine revs about twice as high as a piston engine does in many cases. I’ve always thought about a rotary swap into a lightweight British sports car because of the low weight of around two-hundred and fifty pounds and high horsepower potential of something like two-hundred horsepower-per-litre. Sounds attractive, right? I used to hang out with a guy who had a Mazda RX7 race car. No interior, no heater, full exhaust with a little bullet race muffler, a ton of turbo boost and a tank filled with the good gas. It was fun, it was fast, but it was a nightmare. It barked a fireball out of the tailpipe between shifts, smelled terrible, only made power revved right out, and was about as fun to own as a hand grenade that you’d lost the pin for. Mercedes-Benz actually tried rotary power once in their ultra-experimental C111 series.
Putting the old saying of “there’s nothing more expensive than a cheap Mercedes” to rest, I introduce you to a Mercedes with a Wankel rotary in it. Possibly the most fragile, expensive Mercedes to own, though it never made it to production. The C111 series was actually a pretty cool piece of experimental history that took place in the late sixties and lasted through the seventies. The platform never changed a lot, nor did the overall shape, but the powertrain did. The first two generations utilized rotary power, while the third used a turbo diesel, oddly enough. The fourth and final version used a twin-turbo V8, a more conventional choice for a sports car. Apparently, the diesel got incredible fuel economy, but rolling coal doesn’t hold a candle to the fireball that a Wankel can bark out, while it lasts, anyway.
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