This is one of the finest photos I’ve seen of a fintail Benz. The light captures all of its various lines, creases and details perfectly. And of course it’s in front of a bank, even if it’s not the most solid bank in the world.
Curtis Perry Outtake: Mercedes Fintail – Solid As a Bank Vault
– Posted on February 17, 2020
There is no way that Perry Curtis does all these shots with available light or by finding all the CCs by chance. I suspect he is having some of them staged and he brings along a bunch of lighting equipment. In any case his shots are pure ocular confections.
They’re not staged. But he does ocassionally use some portable lighting, but that’s always quite obvious. This one is clearly neither staged nor lit artificially.
I’ve been really liking Fintails lately! I saw one on Bring a Trailer a few months ago and I’ve been keeping track of them ever since – they look good and they’re mostly reasonably priced.
Yeah, but they’re slow as molasses. Driving one on today’s roads would be a challenge.
You know they’re not all diesels, right? A 220S/SE would have no problem at all keeping up with modern traffic.
In 1964, my uncle bought a used 220 that was a 1963. It had manual transmission. My aunt could drive it but she preferred automatic. Then came the summer of 1968 when the “fin tail” lost its clutch. Auntie and the children, my little cousins, were vacationing in Lake Luzerne, NY in the Adirondack Mountains at Grandma’s summer home. My aunt called me (I was living in Bridgeport, Connecticut) because there was no Mercedes Dealer unless the vehicle were towed 65 miles to Albany, NY. I was selling International Trucks at the time. I called the nearest International dealer, who was ten miles away in Glens Falls, NY. International medium duty trucks in those days used hydraulic clutches. The service manager said that they would take a look at the 220. Two days later, Auntie was back on the road.
Must be the day for Fintails. I got a link to this article in my inbox this morning:
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/1962-mercedes-benz-220s-fintail-classic-car-profile/?wc_mid=4035:18483&wc_rid=4035:2108735&_wcsid=51DD279E0D116DE219B31E6DC7785DA4B19FEE3AB69C54A4
No offence; great photograph. Just needed a tweak and a bit.
I suspected downtown San Francisco and your tweak showed the Examiner newspaper machine on the left. Give me another hour and I might come up with the bank’s location. Ah, but time is short as I leave for the USS Hornet now.
Is Perry Curtis related to Curtis Perry? 🙂
These must have been good cars, because any other car still rocking tailfins and fishbowl windshields in 1969 would have been laughed off the market…
One would like to think so. 🙂
I’ve been running a bit ragged lately….which increases the likelihood of typos exponentially.
My very first CC contribution is here:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-outtake/cc-outtake-1966-heckflosse-reporting-for-duty/
Eh, if these things are so great, how come James Bond could outrun them with a halfassed car built in a shed by a tractor company?
Those weren’t heckflosses..
Another superb Curtis Perry photo – just gorgeous. Jim.
My father bought a 1967 Fintail, a 230 model with a manual transmission – we picked it up at the factory during one of his military assignments in Germany. I still remember the first time I saw it waiting for us outside in a courtyard, and how carsick the smell of the seats made me driving home (in my defense, I was only six years old).
That car stayed in the family until the late 1980s, serving faithfully first as the family car, then my ride at university until I got tired of not having air conditioning in Houston, and finally my younger sister’s first car. She eventually traded it in not long after she got her first job, which was in Denver – she needed something that could handle the mountains without slowing down to a crawl.
Fintails are still fairly cheap here in the USA, with pretty good ones listed for around 11-13k. There are usually a few for sale online, some even with air conditioning, which I believe was a period aftermarket accessory available from some dealers.
My sister and I looked into buying one recently for nostalgia reasons, and I found one locally that was very nice in the same color our family used to have. It drove surprisingly well, and felt really solid. The thing that surprised me the most was just how big the trunk was – I had not remembered that. I really wanted to buy it, but we could not find garage space, so had to pass on it. Maybe someday…