This past Saturday, the local Greenville, SC chapter of CORSA held its first autocross of 2012. For those only familiar with the Corvair in a cultural sense, this might seem akin to getting a bunch of epileptics together and attempting to shoot apples off of their heads with buckshot. But, if you move past Mr. Nader's book and actually get behind the wheel of an American Porsche, what you'll find is a car that, in the hands of a driver who understands the difference between oversteer and understeer, is quite a capable handler.
Unfortunately, although I am both a member of the Greenville Corvair Club and a member of the board of said club, none of my Corvairs was in operational status on Saturday morning. So I drove this:
Luckily, the Corvair drivers were understanding of my plight and let me turn timed laps in my German tank. There was, though, a bit of speculation in the stands as to how the MB would match up to the Corvairs. My 450SL is a 1980 model, which as the last year for the 450 before they went to the 380 engine in the R107 chassis. It is a heavy engine, and was rated at only 160HP by the time the EPA was through with it. My particular example is a good-running, 135,000 mile, mostly-original specimen. The tires are nothing-special Michelins, 205/70R14, and the curb weight with me sitting in the driver's seat was approaching 4000 pounds. So, it wasn't quite the equivalent of bringing a gun to a knife fight, as one might expect a Mercedes-Corvair matchup to be.
It did look good on the track, though.
Every other vehicle was either a Corvair or a Corvair-powered kit car. As such, they had anywhere from 80 to 180 horsepower or so, and all under-weighed my car by a half-ton or more. Some of the Corvairs were full-on race specimens, not even street legal.
The autocross was held at Anderson Speedway, a 3/8 mile paved, banked oval. Cones were set up to create slaloms and gates, and we had an electronic timer for official lap times. Two laps around the track made one run. It quickly became evident that the Mercedes, with its low 3.0's final drive and 3 speed automatic, was going to be quickest left in first gear- even on the longest straight the engine never rev'ed over 4500 RPM. I did 3 runs, with one DNF and the other two right around a minute and a half second (1.00.500). Pretty consistent- and also very close to the top of the field.
After some discussion about the best lines around the track, I went out in the second session and turned three sub-one minute runs, all around 58 seconds or so. I DNF'd one run because of a missed gate (which, interestingly, didn't help my time at all). The MB plowed like crazy- I'd removed the rear anti-sway bar a few weeks ago due to a broken link, and still hadn't repaired it. It was an interesting contrast driving a nose-heavy, understeering front-engined car against all of the tail-happy Corvairs.
In the end it came down to me and one other car for the best time of the day. I had him beat by about a second until his second-to-last run, where he turned a 56 second time and cinched the lead. His car was a mostly-stock late model Corvair with a 140 4 carb engine and sticky autocross tires. Had I fixed the rear stabilizer bar and used better tires I'm sure I could have clobbered his time. The Michelins I was running, I later discovered, were date-coded 2000 and starting to crack. I therefore drove home very slowly and cautiously. New tires are in the works, of course. But overall, I found the 450SL to be a very capable Auto-Xer- a bit on the ponderous side, but extremely well behaved and predictable at the limit.
