Youngtimer Sacco day 2023

Today was the third annual Youngtimer Sacco day.   This is an event run by the Mercedes-Benz club to celebrate the cars of the legendary designer, Bruno Sacco.    As with the last two, the event was held at HARS.   HARS is an aviation museum located at Shellharbour Airport in Albion Park NSW.

The event is focused on the cars designed by Bruno Sacco, but other cars could attend.   Sacco was lead designer for Mercedes-Benz from 1975 to 1999.  His era covers a number of key models in Mercedes-Benz history such as the W126, W201, W124, R129, R230 and more.   Sacco also contributed to the W123, although mostly under the direction of Fredrich Geiger.

I had planned to take my 1987 560SEL.   I own three Sacco cars, the 560SEL, my 1987 560SEC and my 1990 300TE.   The 300TE was ruled out as the instrument cluster is still out, as is the centre AC vent.   I’m taking the SEC down to Melbourne later in the week, so I thought I would take the SEL.   However, after driving out of a multi-storey parking lot on Friday night, the drivers window failed to go back up.   I assume the plastic slide in the window regulator is broken or jammed.   That ruled it out and I took the SEC instead.    The SEC went well, and the wheel alignment and balance seems to have fixed my wheel wobble issue, although I still have some vibration at low speed turning.

As with the 2020 event, we started at Tynan’s Mercedes-Benz dealership.     We then took the Grand Pacific drive though the Royal National Park before ending up at HARS.    Unlike the last two events, we could not drive the cars onto the apron.   Some idiot drove a BMW M-car at high speed on an active runway, causing cars to be banned.  I hate these knee-jerk rules, they should have just thrown the book at the offender.

The drive through the national park was good as always, and the cyclist menace was not as bad as normal.   HARS is well worth a visit – they had multiple aircraft flying, and we could take a tour of the Super Constellation and the Boeing 747.    I took my three kids and they all enjoyed HARS.

After a couple of hours at HARS, we took a very enjoyable drive over Macquarie Pass to Moss Vale for lunch.   This was the same place we had lunch in 2020.

I understand there were more than 30 cars on the day.   This time the W124 was the clear majority.   In the first year, the W126 was king of the hill, especially the 420SEL.   There were probably as many 420SELs as there were cars today.   Although I am a big fan of the designs of Bruno Sacco, my favourite car on the day was the W111 280SE 3.5 cabriolet, a design of Paul Bracq.

The day was really good, and an improvement over 2021.   In 2021 the weather was rather poor, and we didn’t do the second drive for lunch.     I’m glad that was brought back.      We didn’t top 2020 as that event was huge and we had access to the apron to show off the cars.   I think that was what was missing this time – we didn’t have the showcase of all the Sacco designs lined up.

I certainly enjoyed the day and Youngtimer Sacco day remains one of the premier events on the MBCNSW calendar.