The aesthetics of a product can never hope to make up for poor-quality technology.” You may well think that these words were spoken by an electronics engineer, but you’d be wrong. They were spoken by a car designer. Not just any car designer, but hall-of-famer Bruno Sacco – the head of Mercedes Styling Department who oversaw virtually every Mercedes-Benz shape over the last quarter of the 20th Century.
If you know your Mercedes history, you’ll know that this covered classics like the W201 190, the W126 S-Class, and the W124 E-Class. It also included the car that we feature here, the R129-generation Mercedes-Benz SL. Sacco had no comprehension of form following function. Even in an era of technological upheaval, he knew that “there is no primacy of technology over design or design over technology.”
The R129 had some big boots to fill. Its predecessor, the much-loved R107, was in production from 1971 through to 1989, but the explosive growth in computing power of the late Eighties opened the door to a new kind of luxury roadster. What’s not so well appreciated is that the R129 SL went into design lock as early as 1984.
The development program actually began in the mid-Seventies. At the start of the 1980s, however, work accelerated, and the first wind-tunnel results were achieved for the body in November 1981, a car with the recognisable Bruno Sacco
