The ‚Aerodynamic Three‘

This month, with the 100 year anniver­sary of May­bach Cars rapid­ly approach­ing, we want to look at an extra­or­di­nary set of May­bach cars. It brought togeth­er the high-per­for­mance engines and chas­sis of May­bach-Motor-Works with state of the art stream­line technology.

These cars, of which there were three in all, were fit­ted with bod­ies accord­ing to designs by Paul Jaray — one of the lead­ing design­ers in the field of stream­lin­ing. Dur­ing his stud­ies he had devel­oped con­cepts for stream-lined car bod­ies which were fit­ted onto chas­sis of a vari­ety of man­u­fac­tur­ers of its day. After their inven­tor, they were even called ‚Jaray-Form‘. The chas­sis cho­sen for the May­bach exam­ples that were com­mis­sioned by the com­pa­ny itself as research and pre­sen­ta­tion pieces, were the Schwingachs-Wagen (Swing­ing-Axle Car) or SW mod­els. Roads had improved and the express­way net­work was grad­u­al­ly devel­oped in the years pri­or to the launch of the new series. As the dis­tances trav­elled were get­ting longer, the cars also need­ed to be more com­fort­able. The solu­tion had been a new and improved sus­pen­sion sys­tem, the ‚Swing­ing Axle‘ which would today be called sin­gle wheel suspension.

Unlike oth­er ear­li­er exam­ples, which were most­ly embody­ing a stream­line-spir­it if you will, these cars indeed had an increased per­for­mance. There is a pho­to­graph which shows the effect of the stream­lin­ing dirt from the roads is only along the low­er side of the car. To fur­ther reduce air-fric­tion, an uncon­ven­tion­al way to store the spare wheel was cho­sen — it was in the inte­ri­or of the vehi­cle and not on the out­side or in a trunk. It was built by the main part­ner of May­bach-Motor-Works when it came to bod­ies, Spohn of Ravens­burg. The first car with a Jaray stream­line design, built in 1922 using a Ley T 6 chas­sis had also been man­u­fac­tured by the com­pa­ny. While you might expect that this extreme design would have been man­u­fac­tured using the lat­est mate­ri­als and means, alu­minum for exam­ple, the estab­lished meth­ods were used. What it need­ed was pre­ci­sion and expe­ri­ence of trans­lat­ing a design to real­i­ty and Spohn deliv­ered once again and did so by using a wood­en frame onto which thin met­al plates were applied.

The first of three Jaray Stream­line May­bach’s built was based on the SW 35, the first ver­sion of its series by May­bach-Motor-Works. In con­tem­po­rary images it appears black and grey, how­ev­er accord­ing to sources its col­or scheme was red top and fend­ers, beige sides. It was first pre­sent­ed at the Paris Motor Show where it was met with pos­i­tive respons­es by the media. It was offered for sale and most like­ly was acquired by the, in its day super­star box­er Max Schmel­ing. The trace of this spe­cial vehi­cle is lost after WW II.

At the IAA (Inter­na­tion­al Auto­mo­bile Exhi­bi­tion) Berlin 1935 anoth­er SW 35 was pre­sent­ed with reversed col­or scheme. The car was released for sale and accord­ing to one of the lead­ing experts was pur­chased by an actor. Most like­ly it was Gus­tav Fröh­lich, one of Ger­many’s most famous actors in that time who also played in the movie ‚Metrop­o­lis‘. Why anoth­er col­or scheme was cho­sen is not deliv­ered, how­ev­er a sim­i­lar approach was take with a May­bach twelve-cylin­der Zep­pelin show car, which lat­er was repaint­ed in the reverse col­or scheme.

The last exam­ple of the series was based on a SW 38 and was com­plete­ly paint­ed in dark blue — it was shown at the IAA Berlin in the fol­low­ing years. An image from the time shows it in front of hotel Kaiser­hof which was the start­ing point for rides to show­case the speed and reduces gas con­sump­tion of this new vehi­cle. The SW 38 was for sale but despite a Swedish prospec­tive buy­er, it can be assumed that the body was dis­man­tled before the start of the war.