MAKING A MARQUE

Mercedes W114/115 range provided the German maker with a volume-selling leg-up that still resonates to this day

- MARTIN BUCKLEY

Mercedes-Benz, during its chrome-bumper era, could never be accused of making changes for change's sake. Instead, it tended to make a careful plan and stick with it. The Ponton of 1953, the first modern, unitary-bodied Mercedes passenger car, was the genesis of a post-war concept that would carry the marque through to the '70s. It was nothing more than a beautifully engineered and built three-box, five-seat, overhead-cam-engined saloon car with swing-axle rear suspension that, across a typical nine-year production cycle, was expected to serve as a diesel taxi workhorse while also, in its six-cylinder form, cutting the mustard as luxury transport.

So if the 1959 Fintail range was little more than a safer, more fashionable Ponton, then the W108 - and its various extrapolations was really just a tidied-up Fintail with a variety of six-cylinder and V8 engine options. Certain glamour models such as the 300SL and 300 Adenauers fell outside of this mainstream engineering rationalism, but even the pretty Pagoda SL series was really just a prudent development of Fintail technology.

The elegant 'square-back' W108s and W109s began to establish a more prestigious line of Mercedes saloons - not officially an S-Class yet but, significantly, offering no four-cylinder or diesel models in a range that could only extend itself up, never down.

Behind the scenes in the mid-1960s the Stuttgart engineers were cultivating plans for a new, medium-sized saloon range, known collectively as the W114 and W115, that would not only supplant the W110/111/112 models (whose baroque styling was falling rapidly out of favour), but also establish a new chassis bloodline that would form the basis of the firm's engineering through to the end of the '80s.