Hi there,
My name is Dave Tobin, I joined the Pagoda SL Group last year and look forward to becoming more active in the forums during 2015.
I'm a car guy, through and through, to put it mildly. I never paid too much attention to Mercedes SLs or Pagoda SLs until I fell in with a group of local Mercedes Club members who all had them and who organized a spin off group of our local Mercedes Club called 'The Pagoda Pack'. As usual, it was the efforts of a single individual that made a difference. This gentleman really built a solid Pagoda community in my area of Minneapolis, MN. A guy named Ken Garelick organized 'the Pagoda Pack' - put the word out to all Pagoda owners in the area that he was putting together a local registry of Pagodas and their owners, he even published a newsletter called 'The Pack Update' for a few years, chronicling the people and their cars, organizing events, etc.
I was invited as a guest to a few of these events (as I had no Pagoda at the time... I had a '73 280C) and found this was a fun group of people who were quite passionate about their cars, I began to appreciate them. Over the intervening couple of years I started working with the publisher of the SL Market Letter -
http://www.slmarket.com, John Olson, and got that much further engrained in the classic Mercedes hobby. I’ve recently taken over editor duties of that publication.
So along the way I drank the Pagoda Kool Aid and last Spring, after the sale of my old air cooled Porsche 911 (not a car that was easy to part with!) I found a 1965 230SL Euro model locally that had been imported into the U.S. in the mid 1980s, still equipped with its Euro lights and gauges... interestingly, it was almost the exact same color as the 911 I had just parted with, "Red Poly" is the Mercedes color... sort of a metallic red / orange / copper color... I knew when I went to see it... as soon as I saw it, I was going to take it home.
That was that... I was finally a part of our local "Pagoda Pack" and the next logical step was to become a member of the slw113.org group... so, here I am.
My car is a solid driver example, not a show car, a car that I drive and use as often as possible. For the past 3 years I have organized a vintage car rally / tour, the Walleye 1000 Vintage Rally -
http://www.walleye1000.com. A classic car tour that covers about 500 miles of back roads around Minnesota and Wisconsin over two days. The 230SL was a champ running that event last year. I also took it on a trip with a couple of other car guy friends (one in a 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta, the other in a 1965 Porsche 356C) to Elkharlt Lake, WI for the July vintage races last Summer... about 700 miles over back roads that weekend... it was a blast.
The 230SL is as close to a Mercedes 'sports car' (in that 1960s sort of way) as I have found... It seems to drive like an Alfa, but it's got all the reliability and robustness of a Mercedes. What’s not to like?
