Mercedes-Benz is no stranger to wild lap times at the Nurburgring, but has it always been so? In a sense, yes.
YouTube sim racer and IRL race car driver Jimmy Broadbent recently decided to take the automaker’s first car and, indeed, the first gas-powered vehicle ever, the 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen, around the fearsome track to see exactly how deep in its DNA hot laps go.
The test is possible thanks to the Assetto Corsa modding community. User SATLAB is responsible for the project, which took place over the course of nearly 10 months. The car has been faithfully recreated for the racing sim, though SATLAB says that the nature of the endeavor led to some “bugs, or extra features…”
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The car cannot be played by the AI because it’s so slow that the computer stops immediately after the start of the race. The original car only made two-thirds of a hp (0.69 PS/0.4 kW), but it actually has 1 hp (1.01 PS/0.7 kW) in the game because any less and it wouldn’t have moved at all.
The result is a top speed of just 13 km/h (8 mph), which probably felt like a lot from the tiller, but does not look good when you consider that the Nurburgring is nearly 21 km (13 miles) long. The Motorwagen does have a secret weapon up its sleeve: neutral.
On downhill sections, Broadbent says that the car can just be popped into neutral and gravity can be allowed to help the car reach speeds Karl Benz could have only dreamed of. Early in the run, he’s able to more than quintuple the Motorwagen’s supposed top speed and hit 70 km/h (43 mph).
At those speeds, the dynamics are less than ideal.
“It actually turns very sharply, given that it has three wheels,” says Broadbent. “But it’s got a sort of, like, a Robin Reliant-style situation where you just go whoa! And you just go over. And that’s it.”
What goes down must come up, though, and the good work that gravity does helping the car down hills slows it to a crawl going up them. On the steeper inclines, the Motorwagen is stopped completely and Broadbent has to zigzag up, lengthening his lap time considerably.
In the end, it takes the car more than 80 minutes to do what it takes the fastest current Mercedes-Benz (the AMG GT Black Series) just 6:43 to do. That’s more than 100 years of progress for you, I guess.