Karl Kling (16 September 1910, Gießen – 18 March 2003, Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, Germany) was a motor racing driver and manager from Germany.
He participated in 11 Formula One Grands Prix, debuting on 4 July 1954. He achieved 2 podiums, and scored a total of 17 championship points. Info from Wiki
Bio by Stephen Latham
Karl Kling began competing at the age of 22 on motorcycles in cross-country and reliability trials. He became a reception clerk for Mercedes and while there was given a test drive for their cross-country rally team, which he passed.
In his first drive he won a Gold Medal in the East Prussian Winter Rally but in the Polish Rally a crash with a level crossing barrier took the roof of his car, thankfully leaving its crew uninjured. At Brandenburg in 1939 six competitors were killed and his was the only Mercedes works entry to finish the course.
After the war he resumed his racing with a BMW 328 and after becoming national sports car champion in 1947, he acquired a Veritas RS in 1948 and won the title for the next two seasons. In 1950, he raced an F2 Veritas Meteor-BMW to victory at Solitude, beating drivers including Hermann Lang, Hans Stuck and Manfred von Brauchitsch.
He joined the Mercedes sports car team in 1952 and his 300SL won the Prix de Berne that supported the Swiss Grand Prix. Racing a Mercedes Benz 300SL he won the Carrera Panamericana, a 1923-mile road race through Mexico. During the race the car struck a vulture, causing three burst tyres, shattering the windscreen and knocked navigator Hans Klerk unconscious, though after recovering, he would set a new record of 136mph. They also raced in the Mille Miglia and were leading by eight minutes but a delay caused by a jammed wheel during a tyre-change, and then failing brakes saw them finish second.
In 1953, he drove for Alfa Romeo and was leading the Mille Miglia until his transmission failed.
Unfortunately at the Nurburgring, he crashed into a bridge parapet, breaking his ribs and shoulders, though he recovered to drive for Porsche in the Pan Americana.
Having dominated before the war, with Caracciola, Lang, von Brauchitsch and Seaman, Mercedes wanted to regain their former status. With their W196, and a line-up of Juan Manuel Fangio, Karl Kling and Hans Herrmann for the 1954 French GP, Kling would take second place, finishing less than a second behind Fangio. Later that year he was placed seventh at Silverstone, fourth in Germany, and fifth in Spain and, away from the World Championship, won the Berlin GP (at AVUS) and the Swedish GP.
1955 would see him finish fourth in Argentina, and third in the British Grand Prix, but suffered a broken leg when his 300SLR crashed during the Mille Miglia.
Mercedes withdrew from racing at the end of the year but he stayed with them, replacing Alfred Neubauer as competitions manager for its rally programme. He sometimes competed himself and drove a 220SE to victory in the 1961 Algiers-Cape Town trans-African rally.
He retired from the company in 1970 and settled on the German banks of Lake Constance, where he passed away in 2003.
