“The best or nothing”: the workshop reviving rare cars.

“Das Beste oder nichts.” These words are painted in large letters on the wall above the paint shop at Sleeping Beauties’ Brisbane workshop. Attributed to the founding fathers of Mercedes-Benz, they translate simply as “the best or nothing” – and they perfectly capture the workshop’s philosophy. 

Ever since founder Wolf Grodd opened the workshop’s doors in 1988, Sleeping Beauties has specialised in high-end classic car restorations. The team has completed more than 600 projects for collectors of rare cars around the world, including for Mercedes-Benz Australia and the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. 

Today, Sleeping Beauties is owned and run by James Millar. As the workshop has spent nearly four decades keeping pieces of Mercedes-Benz history alive, it was an obvious stop on our ‘140 Years. 140 Places.’ world tour in the Mercedes-Benz S-Class.

The highest standards of quality

What makes Sleeping Beauties unique is that it’s Australia’s only fully in-house classic car restoration workshop. From the moment a car arrives to the moment it leaves, not a single component needs to leave the premises. 

It’s a big operation to run – Sleeping Beauties employs around 25 expert craftspeople across its mechanical, engine, transmission, body, paint, trim, electrical, instrument, assembly and injection pump departments – but James says keeping everything in-house is the key to achieving a perfect result. 

“Efficiency and quality standards – that ability to have everything planned. Otherwise, you’re relying on other companies to do all these things,” he says. 

Given the age and rarity of many of the vehicles that pass through the workshop, replacement parts often don’t exist. It’s up to the skill of the team to rebuild and recondition every component – from the engine to the seat upholstery to the door seals – to ensure each car is as good as, if not better than, new.

That dedication to detail has earned Sleeping Beauties awards at concours events around the world, including the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in California. A 1934 Mercedes-Benz 380 Cabriolet A (one of just 16 built, and the car that appeared at the 1934 Geneva Motor Show) scored a class victory and outright podium finish in 2005 following a seven-year restoration. It repeated the feat in 2017, despite the restoration being 13 years old by then – a testament to the quality of the original work. 

There are plenty of beautiful old classic cars in the world, so why the focus on Mercedes-Benz? “The cars we typically focus on are pre-1970,” James explains, “and Mercedes-Benz was the best car in the world by some mile at that point.”

Age-defying classic and rare cars

With more than a dozen examples completed, Sleeping Beauties is one of the world’s leading authorities on the iconic Mercedes-Benz 300 SL ‘Gullwing’, and James says the car completely defies its 70-year vintage. 

“The 300 SLs, they’re just like a modern car – you could hop in [one] and drive it around Australia, you could use it as a daily driver if you wanted to… when it came to a turn-key, reliable car that you could depend on, good steering, good braking, that was really the first supercar, because it did everything [along] with the looks.” 

After successfully completing a 1958 Mercedes-Benz 220 S Cabriolet for the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, the factory later sent Sleeping Beauties a dismantled 1960 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster found in Japan. As the Sleeping Beauties website puts it: “Restoring this car for the factory was very challenging. No pressure.”

While the 300 SL is already established as a bona fide gold-standard classic, in James’ view, it’s the 300 S Roadster that deserves more of the spotlight. “It was the flagship Mercedes-Benz, the most expensive car you could have bought at the time,” James tells us.

Hailed by the press at the time as the "car of the world elites" and as a "model for what can be achieved today in automobile construction”, 560 examples of the 300 S were built between 1952 and 1958 – 216 coupes, 203 Cabriolet As and 141 roadsters – and it cost US$12,680 in 1953. Owners included Cary Grant and the Aga Khan, while the example restored by Sleeping Beauties was originally bought by Argentinian President Juan Perón for his wife, Evita. 

In 2000, the team also completed the restoration of a stunning 1924 Benz 11/40 Tourer, which now resides at Mercedes-Benz Australia’s headquarters in Melbourne.

The allure of a classic car collection

For those wishing to embark on their own restoration project, James urges caution.

“We normally talk people out of doing restorations because it’s the wrong car,” he explains. “It’s obviously a very costly process and to do a full restoration can cost up to the high hundreds of thousands of dollars. “When it comes to something that’s sentimental, it’s totally up to the beholder, but a lot of the time, the best way to go for restoration is to come to us with an idea of what sort of car they want to do. We will then guide them into which one and try and find them a car, because it’s very easy to buy a project which may cost twice as much as another one.”

Just as with the restoration itself, planning and preparation are everything. If you’re going to spend that much time and money bringing a classic Mercedes-Benz back to its former glory, you might as well have the best.