Habibie's Gullwing not quite kosher

By Alastair Sloane

Habibie's Gullwing not quite kosher Habibie's Gullwing a bit of a bitser

Indonesian President B.J. Habibie describes it as "an old flame from my past."

"It" is a Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing he restored. But it isn't like any other Merc. It's a bits and pieces Gullwing cobbled together to look like the 1950s original - sort of.

And it wasn't a project Habibie worked on during his university days in the 1950s in Germany, when he worked at the Ford plant in Cologne to earn money for tuition fees, or his time as the director of applied technology for the Messerschmitt aircraft company.

He rebuilt the SL in the 1980s after he had returned to Indonesia to head the country's state-owned aircraft industry.

"Fantastic, isn't it?" he said in the January 1997 issue of Mercedes magazine. "The Mercedes people in Jakarta couldn't believe it at first. They just gave me an incredulous look and thought 'he can't be all there.'"

Habibie found the Gullwing in the Sumatran jungle, near the grave of a sultan. It was a basically a rusted wreck. He and the Mercedes-Benz agent in Jakarta rebuilt it, fusing the space frame design of the classic Gullwing with parts from modern SL models. It took two and a half years of hammering and welding together parts that were never meant to be joined in the first place.

Practically everything about the Gullwing differs from what its designers had in mind back in the 50s. From example, the steering wheel is on the right-hand side, it is power-assisted, and the modern straight-six engine is coupled to a modern automatic transmission.

"What difference do 40 years make if the platform is right?" asked Habibie.

The one-off Gullwing is not Habibie's only personal form of transport. He owns three classic cars and a motorcycle with a sidecar that former hardline Indonesian boss Suharto once used.