√Think VIP vans are a new thing? Meet the Mercedes-Benz Brabus T1

Back in the ’80s, if you wanted a hot Mercedes but had a big family, the team at Brabus had you covered.

Let me set the scene.

It’s 1984, and you and a bunch of friends are heading from Munich via Stuttgart to attend the Monsters of Rock concert in Karlsruhe. Mötley Crüe to open, with Van Halen and AC/DC headlining. Good times.

You want to travel in style and comfort, and don’t mind shopping a little bit ‘off menu’ for the right set of wheels. Plus seeing as our scenario is in the early ’80s, you have money to spend and no one questions where it comes from.

You need seating for six and your transportation must be cool, but also practical. Naturally, reliability is paramount.

Quite simply, you need the Brabus Autosport T1, the baddest bus from Bonn to Bremen.

Packing a low front spoiler with foglamps, arch extension flares, wide Rial Mesh alloy wheels and even a side exit exhaust, the Brabus T1 certainly looked the part on the outside.

The interior could be customised to suit, with plush velour captain’s chairs, drinks fridge and even the latest in cutting-edge audio, the Blaupunkt Berlin IQR 83, with multichannel amplifiers and 16-band graphic equaliser.

Blaupunkt image source: http://antique-autoradio-madness.org/

Sufficed to say, with this setup, 99 Luftballoons would have sounded so good it would have seemed that Nena was in the van. And given the scenario we’ve described, she probably was.

The customised T1 needed to be accommodating though, as, despite the aggressive appearance, the Brabus bus was pure Mercedes-Benz T1 underneath.

Produced between 1977 and 1994, the pre-Sprinter Sprinter was offered with a choice of either a 48kW 2.4-litre four-cylinder diesel or 63kW low-compression 2.3-litre four-cylinder petrol engine. It wasn’t powerful, but it was reliable, which meant the 350-odd kilometre trip from Stuttgart to our concert would have taken the best part of four hours.

Hopefully, you packed plenty of tapes!

Worth noting too, is that of nearly one-million T1s built, there’s no record as to how many Brabus conversions were created. Rarity comes in all shapes and sizes it seems.

The Brabus T1 wasn’t the only modified toaster to wear the three-pointed star either.

Lorinser went down a similar route with a quad-lamp kit on the T1, and both Brabus and AMG tried their hand at the smaller MB100D van, the latter dressing the boxy ‘Benz up with Morette-style quad headlamps, period-perfect reflective heckblende and of course, monoblock wheels.

A number of DTM race teams used the AMG van as a team transporter, proving that the only thing cooler than a 1990s touring car is a van in matching livery.