Karl
Kling

Karl Kling was born in Giessen on 16 September 1910. He joined Daimler-Benz in the mid-1930s as a reception clerk and spent his spare time competing in hillclimbs and trials in production cars. During the Second World War he serviced Luftwaffe aircraft, and after the war he returned to racing in a BMW 328. In the early 1950s he played a part in Mercedes' return to international competition, and in 1952 he won the Carrera Panamericana.

In 1954 Kling was picked for the revived Mercedes Grand Prix team. On his debut at the French Grand Prix in Reims he finished second to team-mate Juan Manuel Fangio, less than a second behind, and so became the first German driver to take a podium in Formula One. In September 1954 he also won the Berlin Grand Prix at AVUS, a non-championship race. He ended that season fifth in the drivers' standings after six starts. In 1955 he started five races. He missed the Monaco Grand Prix after a crash at the Mille Miglia, but took a second podium at the British Grand Prix and finished the championship in eleventh place. In total he made 11 starts and reached the podium twice, without a win.

In the 1955 World Sportscar Championship, Kling and Fangio finished second together in each of the two races that remained after the Le Mans disaster, helping Mercedes to the title. Mercedes withdrew from international racing after 1955. In 1956 Kling took over from Alfred Neubauer as head of Mercedes motorsport, a post he held until 1968. During that time Mercedes motorsport was limited to production models. Kling held the post during the rallying campaigns of the 1960s, in which he occasionally drove himself. In 1961 he won the Algiers-Bangui-Algiers Rally in a Mercedes-Benz 220 SE. Kling died on 18 March 2003, aged 92.

Source: Wikipedia, “Karl Kling”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.