LOADS of LUXURY

Once the company car of the world's oldest surviving F1 driver, and the only one of its kind: James Elliott drives the Crayford Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3 estate

- james elliott

ALL CAR NERDS are drawn to a supersaloon - and the crazier the better, whether it be Lotus Carlton or earsplitting Aussie V8s tearing up Mount Panorama - but we tend to go even more weak-kneed at the sight of an insane estate. There is an irresistible sense of two-fingered defiance in even the mere gesture of creating a bonkers family wagon: you should fear the out-and-out beefcake less than the big out-of-shape kid with the wild glint in his eye.

So, not your sporting shooting brake like a Radford DB5 or whatever, but a proper four-door, two-box tip-tripmeister. This rebellion was never better epitomised than by Rydell and Lammers racing Volvo-TWR 850 estates in the 1994 British Touring Car Championship, while Audi and Porsche established a template for all wild wagons since in the RS2... yet both were already 25 years behind the game.

If you wanted a bona fide super-estate back in the late 1960s, you could either up-engine an existing wagon (Cortina Savage Estate, for example) or estatify an existing supersaloon. And if you went for the latter option there was one stand-out candidate, the only true four-door supersaloon of the era until Jaguar put 12s in its 6s, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3.

Coming towards the end of Merc's most stately stackedheadlight pomp (courtesy of Paul Bracq), the 300 SEL inline-six version of the sophisticated air-suspended mid'60s W108/109 full-size saloon (for convenience's sake, we'll call it an S-Class) should have satisfied most appetites, but, if not, surely the proposed 3.5 V8 that would emerge in August 1969 would be all the continent-shrinking executive saloon that anyone could ever have wanted.