As you will read on pages 104-108, I recently enjoyed blasting around the United Arab Emirates in a 1977 Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL 6.9. What a great barge. I don’t mean that as a slight; it really was immensely good to drive in hot and sometimes rough conditions. On self-levelling hydropneumatic suspension, it handled rutted desert tracks with the same equanimity as it dealt with the fast, billiard table-smooth motorways that spear through the region’s mountains and sand dunes.
In the 1970s this W116 Benz, one of only
