Some German once said that when you stare into the engine bay, the bay stares back into you. How insightful those Germans! And here it is, a topography of vacuum lines and air hoses and pipes and wires run in endlessly elaborated parallels and perpendiculars. Like a nest built by a family of particularly OCD rats. First thing you see, taking the air cleaner off, is the mechanical fuel injection system, atop which sits the fuel distributor, a chunk of machined aluminum with a bunch of lines coming off it. Eight go to the injectors, one is the input from the high pressure pump, and there’s a return line to the tank. The return line, though, doesn’t go directly to the tank. Like some kind of arterial malformation, it goes instead to a fitting on another high-pressure line. This line is connected to AC compressor. I stared into the engine bay for a good ten minutes pondering this one. I chewed a nail. Drank some coffee. And the bay stared back into me until I figured it out. It’s a heat exchanger. The fuel is cooled on its way back to the tank by the air compressor. How clever those Germans!

Working on a big Mercedes engine, you can get the feeling that there is such a thing as too much development. Too many engineers, too much money and too much coffee. The engine mounts are – and I shit you not – little shock absorbers. Like at the wheels, only smaller: little oil filled pistons. And there’s no computers. A fact which I – fool – thought made things simpler. In fact it makes for the most ungodly complexity of interconnected vacuum switches, analogue sensors, relays, connecting rods and levers and little control units scattered about the car. Anyway. It has leather and polished wood end to end, at least three ashtrays and it goes like hell. And it guzzles the gas, which is the one thing that makes me feel good about life these days. I mean, the poor Saudies, right? Everybody hates them and now they are broke. But at least they had the foresight to sock it away into a sovereign wealth fund while prices were high. Or wait, was that the Norwegians?