If you had told me in the fall of 2004 that a Mercedes-Benz would put me on a magazine cover, I would not have believed you. I had just gotten back from SEMA 2004 and was killing time in Florida before moving to California that December when Modified Luxury & Exotics needed someone in the area to shoot a couple of cars from RENNtech. I photographed two that day, a CL55 and an “SL55K,” and I’m starting with the CL55 because it ended up on the cover of the May/June 2005 issue. That was only the third issue of MLE, so landing a cover that early was a pretty big deal for someone who had been shooting cars “professionally” for barely a year.
RENNtech was already a well-established name when I showed up with a camera in 2004, and the company is still around more than two decades later. Hartmut Feyhl founded RENNtech in 1989 after spending 12 years at AMG in Germany and later serving as Technical Director of AMG North America. By the time I photographed this CL55, RENNtech had already been modifying Mercedes-Benz models for 15 years.
Shooting for MLE was a different experience from the import features I had been doing. Like Sharky’s Porsche 996 Twin Turbo, which I photographed a couple of months later, the luxury and exotic owners I worked with were usually more than willing to let me move their cars around town looking for locations. In RENNtech’s case, Hartmut himself and another employee handled the driving while we bounced between several spots around South Florida to photograph both cars. When I asked if we could do a burnout in the CL55, nobody seemed particularly concerned about it.
I actually liked the SL shoot more. By the time we got to that car, the sun was going down, and I ended up with some of my favorite photos from the day. That feature will come separately, but there were still a handful of CL55 frames I was really happy with. One of them ended up on the cover.
According to the original MLE spec sheet, the CL55 used a RENNtech 5.5-liter V8 with a 97mm bore and 92mm stroke, upgraded pistons and crankshaft, a RENNtech supercharger system and pulley kit, and a RENNtech ECU upgrade. A stainless steel side-exit dual exhaust handled the exhaust side of the setup. The published output was 625 hp at 6,500 rpm and 620 lb-ft of torque at 3,500 rpm, while the same spec sheet listed a 12.5-second quarter-mile at 117 mph. RENNtech also reinforced the axles to deal with the additional power and installed a lowering kit to bring the body down over the wheels.
Those wheels were probably what most people noticed first on the cover. The car wore RENNtech 10-spoke Monolite alloys measuring 19×9 inches up front and 19×10 inches in the rear. The original specs listed 255/25/19 Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 tires in front and 295/30/19 PS2s in the rear. Behind them were RENNtech brakes with 15-inch rotors and eight-piston calipers up front, along with 13-inch rotors and four-piston calipers in the rear.
The exterior changes were fairly restrained compared with what was going on underneath. RENNtech added a trunk decklid spoiler, aerodynamic body accents, and a rear diffuser, but none of it changed the basic shape of the CL55. Inside, the car received a sport steering wheel finished in silver carbon fiber and leather, a 12-piece silver carbon fiber interior kit, and matching silver carbon fiber door handles.
Looking at the photos now, the CL55 isn’t the most extreme car I photographed for MLE, and that’s probably part of why it has aged so well. The Monolites, big brakes, side-exit exhaust, and aero make it obvious that this isn’t a stock CL55, but nothing overwhelms the original design. More than 20 years later, it still looks like the kind of car RENNtech was known for building at the time.
For me, though, this car will always be connected to that cover. I had only been getting paid to photograph cars for about a year when one of these photos ended up on the front of one of MLE’s first issues. More than two decades later, that’s still the first thing I think about whenever I look through this shoot.
GalleryPhotos by Jason Siu
