Hey guys welcome back to legit street cars today, i'm taking a break from my mercedes v12 amg woes to focus on a non-amg mercedes with eight less cylinders, a manual transmission actually first is down here. Second, is up here. Third, it's got a really cool transmission. It also has a working suspension, unlike my cl 65 amg, and this car has just about as much 80s cool factor as you can get so today in the legit street quarters.

We have this a 1987 190e. 2.3. 16 valve it's a lot to say, but this is a lot of car and this was the amg c-class before there was an amg c-class and because this is a full-service car channel. Not only will i be reviewing this car and going over its features, but we're going to be working on this car too.

So this 190e belongs to my friend mark from young timers garage here on youtube and instagram, and you guys they know, mark from legit streetcars classics like insane barn find uncovered after decades, original paperwork inside 50s, mercedes and cadillac, or most recently, first drive of the abandoned Pre-Merger amg car that sat for 27 years fixing preparing everything exclamation. So if you haven't seen those videos, i will link them down below, but mark has a crazy obsession with older and rare mercedes. So, needless to say, mark - and i are good friends - and he just got this one - it came from california right yeah. This is a california card's whole life, pretty much actually prior to that.

It was in canada because it's a canadian spec car, it's got the kilometers on the cluster and it's got the triangle in the trunk that the euro cars came with and uh it has a sunroof which was only option for canada, so it was like one of 500 with that cool, so after you handed the man, the money and the car was officially yours. What happened? Well, you know, i don't want to give the guy a hard time, but it was uh pretty awkward. He started to cry a little bit uh. You know he was on the spoiler and like having a moment with the car um, but you know it was something other than that.

I guess he had a leg problem and he couldn't drive stick shift anymore, so uh. You know, i guess it was hard for him to let let it go. That's the only reason he was honestly selling the car and he knew that i was going to take good care of it. So i'm really happy that i could own this car because it's been on my bucket list.

So when mark told me the guy started crying after he bought the car, i immediately thought what would happen if i ever sold my turbo trans am i'd, probably start bawling as well so kind of a bitter sweet ending for the previous owner. But it's definitely in good hands with mark all right, so i got to show you a little bit of this practically mint condition interior and i think the back seat is one of the coolest parts of this car. This is only a four-seater like my cl 65 and there's just about as much bolstering in the rear seats as there is in the front. Look at this, so you do get a little arm rest here, but these seats are in excellent condition.

They feel so nice too, you kind of feel like you're sitting in the front seat in the back seat, and this does not have any headrests. That was an option, so headrests heated seats and a sunroof, i believe, were the only options on the 2.3 liter 16 valve and the front seats are in excellent condition as well. I don't believe they would actually say recaro like that. I believe the previous owner added that, but these are indeed recaro seats.

They just didn't have any badging from the factory. So earlier i had mentioned, the transmission has a weird shift pattern. You guys are gon na see this once we hit the road for the test. Drive um, but you can kind of get an idea.

Reverse is here, second, is here it's a little odd and this is called a dog leg transmission. It's made specifically for racing, which is cool. Then we have a few gauges here. You have your oil temperature very important, your volt meter and the first time i saw one of these because we had a couple of these come in the dealer when i was a technician at mercedes-benz of chicago.

I thought this was aftermarket. This video gauge, that is, a lap timer, which we are definitely going to try out on the test, drive as well uh, and then it has an aftermarket radio, unfortunately, but mark did find a factory one and the rest of it is pretty mundane. Pretty normal 190e action going on here, uh, the steering wheel, is really nothing special. This car actually came with a c36 steering wheel that mark swapped out for the factory unit and when he did that he broke the windshield, unfortunately, so his ratchet slipped and cracked the windshield.

Luckily, this is only a couple hundred dollars and it's the same one that comes on a factory 190e. Can you believe this thing has 280 000 kilometers, or about 175 000 miles you'd never be able to tell by looking at it just like you'd, never be able to tell that your streaming service actually has a lot more content than it seems. Well, that's unless you had nordvpn i've been using nordvpn for years to keep my internet activity private and secure, but my favorite feature is content unblocking. I use this all the time like when i wanted to watch predator, but it wasn't available on netflix, usa.

I just virtually transported to germany hit refresh and just like that. I have the entire predator collection or like the time when i wanted to watch the office, but it was only available on netflix in the uk and my mom even uses nordvpn to watch italian tv. That's only available in italy, nordvpn has thousands of secure servers all over the world. So don't let your location limit your content, you can get nordvpn on your computer phone and tv so start exploring today.

Best part is, if you guys, click on my link in the video description box or go to nordvpn.com legit you're, going to get a massive discount off their two-year plan, making this only a few dollars a month and they're gon na give you four months for free. So check out the link in the video description box, a big thanks to nordvpn for continuing to support automotive content creators like myself. Now, let's get back to the 190e. Now, probably the most important part of this car would be the engine, so some of the 190es did have a 2.3 liter four-cylinder, but they were only eight valve units, so mercedes got together with cosworth cosworth is a company that's been into performance engines for now, the Better part of like 50 or 60 years, and they developed just the cylinder head on this engine.

So now it's a dual overhead cam 16 valve engine, so four valves per cylinder and it looks to have factory headers. I couldn't imagine them getting any better than this. It looks like this car has aftermarket headers, but they do have a 102 mercedes part number on them. They are factory and i believe this car has a cat delete and some other minor exhaust modifications.

It's fairly quiet like this, so if you guys saw the video mark and i made on the 500 sel amg, you know all about the cis mechanical fuel injection system. This has it as well. So these are the injectors, as you can see, no electrical connectors and it has a fuel distributor right here. This one is in excellent working condition.

This engine runs perfectly and honestly, i'm pretty grateful for that, because i sort of don't really want to mess with this. Ever again, the previous owner added some gigantic spark plug wires. There used to be a little cover here, so mark will probably convert this back to the factory wires. These big into factory cars factory proper period, correct cars um, so the wires will go.

It's got an aftermarket, strut, tower, brace and, as you guys are about to see, because we're gon na pop the wheels off during our inspection, we got ta inspect this car we're getting up on the rack uh. This has e420 brakes all the way around. So we want to inspect those and then just see the general condition of this car underneath because, as it looks right now, it's perfect all right. So this is always the fun part of lifting lowered cars.

This car was low from the factory and then the previous owner lowered it even more so, let's see oh get out of here, we're just barely gon na make it look at that nice. I'm gon na start this party off by removing the wheels and checking out these brakes. So these are actually the evolution. One wheels they're, not the factory wheels that came on the normal 2.3 liter 16 valve, so the factory wheels were 15s.

These are 16 by eight. So quite the improvement all right: let's see what we got! Oh nice, all right, so these aren't the factory brakes as you can tell with the rotors, but these are the calipers off of an e420, so larger calipers and apparently, let's see do these just bolt right up yeah. They look like they just bolt right up. So no modifications - and let's see i'm going to say that these are aftermarket stainless steel, brake hoses and it does have aftermarket lowering springs.

It does have bilstein shocks, it looks like we have a different sway bar, so that's a 500 e sway bar, so the previous owner did do some tasteful suspension modifications on this 190e, but i'm mostly here to see the condition of these brakes. So do we need to replace the brakes? The pads are pretty decent. The outer pad's good, the rotor, doesn't have any lip the inner pad's decent as well. So we'll go around check.

The other ones see what we got, but we're going to continue on. Take this panel down and see if we have any leaks, even in the 80s mercedes, was using panels like this on the bottom, all right yeah. We definitely have an oil leak going on and it's coming from all the way up there. I don't think it's the pan gasket.

I think it's further up kind of hard to tell right now. This is definitely one of those situations where it's been leaking for a long time, you're going to want to pressure wash the engine and then just observe and see where it's coming from. I don't know if these four cylinders had head gasket leaking issues. I know the straight sixes would leak oil externally.

That's how the head gaskets would fail on. Those could be something along those lines, but here is our mercedes 102 engine and the manual transmission. I have never had a manual transmission mercedes on my channel. You rarely see them in the states.

I know you guys in europe are going to comment about this. It's no big deal. We have manuals everywhere. I get it.

I get it. I grew up half the time half of my summers in italy. I know all about manual transmissions in europe. We just don't have them here.

It's just a simple fact here is a steering shock. This is probably leaking. Let's check, oh yeah, this is bad. I shouldn't be able to do this so easily.

Just pulling the car in here the steering felt good. Sometimes it's hard to tell when these are bad, but you can get a little wobble and the steering wheel just doesn't feel as tight, so very easy thing to fix. We used to sell these all the time at the dealership paid a half hour. I remember and take you about three minutes: we're not gon na find this guy in stock anywhere, so i'm just gon na go ahead and put that back and it does look like someone has made some exhaust modifications.

So this pipe leads to a period correct, rentec muffler. I think this is really cool, especially with these tips. It looks very 80s and doesn't really make it that loud. We can see a little bit more of the suspension.

These are h. R springs: we're gon na need some shock boots all the way around. I need those on my cl65 as well. This guy does have an inline fuel pump and fuel filter.

Just like the 500 scl. We were working on a few videos ago. This looks to have a different flex disc setup uh than some of the modern mercedes i'm used to. So this looks to be the flex disc in here, and then this could be like a vibration, dampener or something along those lines.

I'm not really sure. I don't remember seeing this but uh this isn't in the best of condition. This rubber is kind of coming apart. So probably something that needs to be replaced at some point.

But the actual flex disc right here, which connects to the back of the transmission, is in great shape. So, even in the 80s mercedes had these hydraulic engine mounts that would fail all the time and when mark bought this car, he drove it around in california, while he was out there after he bought it, and he had a lower radiator hose right yeah this one Here yeah, so this blew up on him, so he had that replaced and he had uh both of the engine mounts replaced at the same time at that shop, that this is awesome that apparently left their tool no way look at that they forgot it's not built In no, let's see hold on what brand is it's a mac? This is a nice piece, man you might want to mail, this back to them. They're, probably really missing this guy. That's awesome! Here you go mark, so this is really cool.

This car had a self-leveling rear suspension setup, so keep in mind the 190e was kind of like a c-class. It was the entry-level mercedes, not this one in particular, but it has a level sensor right here. You can see this linkage, it's adjustable, so i'm not sure if that's factory or aftermarket and then it has accumulators here and big hydraulic lines going to these shocks and there's a reservoir under the hood as well kind of a unique feature that you wouldn't expect to See on a car like this, some of the much more expensive mercedes had systems just like this all right. So, even though the pads look to have a decent amount of life, we are gon na, swap them out for some akibono pads.

You guys know that i've been using these. Basically, my entire career for an aftermarket pad. I really like these they're ceramic and mark is just not happy with the performance of these pads. I already did the other side.

They seem a little glazed over and the brake fluid is super dirty, so we're gon na swap out the pads and hopefully that'll, help all right. So these calipers have been painted a couple times. They were blue now, there's some kind of orange, but you don't want to get in the habit of scratching your calipers. So i'm going to be using an old mercedes-benz of chicago t-shirt to protect these guys.

So we don't chip them up and we're just going to use these to compress the pad, so we can get them out there. We go and they definitely just sprayed these on the car you can tell the pins are painted as well. So goodbye paint all right out with the old yeah. These things are just a little glazed over they've been used for sure, actually they're, probably about 50 percent life.

You can see they're about to trip the sensor, so not a bad idea to swap these out. I'm going to put a little bit of brake paste on here as well and in with the new okay. We didn't get any new hardware with the brakes, but this hardware seems to be in good shape, so we will reuse it all right. So we're kind of at the mercy of the local auto parts store.

They of course, do not have brake pad sensors for this guy either, and so i'm going to attempt to reuse these. I was able to get the other side out no problem, but this one is kind of a little mangled come on. Okay, we'll stick this in there, but uh yeah, we're gon na have to replace this guy all right time to hit up the rear, and this pin wasn't pushed in all the way. No problem, though, doing a pad slap on these are so easy.

Anybody can do these at home just popping out two pins, then, with the old pad you're, just compressing it a little bit. These look practically new, so we're barely moving anything look at this yeah i mean we don't need to do these, but i'm hoping that's swapping out to a different brand pad will uh bring back a little bit of the performance there. We go all right, this one's being kind of a pain, yeah. Okay mark you didn't see that it's fine all right slide this little guy in look at these cute little baby pads.

Look at that all right, we're done with the brakes! So, moving on to the brake fluid flush, except, i forgot my fluid exchanging vacuum pump at home and then, of course, we're using the good stuff, the amsoil synthetic brake fluid link down below. If you guys want 25 off amsoil stuff, i'm a dealer all right. So without the vacuum bleeder we're using a bucket, and this hose and uh yeah. This is a 3 8 for some reason probably had to replace these bleeders at some point.

All right mark go ahead and push down and up and down yep we're getting good fluid and up all right, we'll go around. Do all of these get rid of this nasty brake, fluid and uh yeah. Let's go for a ride all right. So here is the dogleg transmission, and this was specifically put in this car because they wanted it to be used on the track, so reverse is actually up over and all the way over here.

That is reverse, so normally you'd go this way for first, but we actually have to go down and to the left for first, and the idea here is that second and third gear are right in the middle and if you're doing a road course and racing this Car you're primarily going to be in second and third, so this is a much easier shift which i'd have to agree for those purposes. This would be nice, but let's see how this is in the real world to drive. This is my first time all right here. We go taking off in the cosworth head equipped.

190E, all right, second gear, all right yeah, so second and third is sweet. It's so easy just up and down. I love that, and here we're gon na take a little turn here. Go down to.

First all right. We're coming out of a turn at the track. Yeah second to third is sweet. I, like it wow, the transmission is buttery, smooth, not sure if it's ever been rebuilt, i'm gon na probably venture to say it hasn't.

These things are just nice wow all right. So we're in third back down to second very easy rev match on this high revving four cylinder. I wasn't paying attention uh, but we're supposed to shift around 7000 rpm all right. Let's see what this feels like.

Oh man, slamming the brakes. Okay, we had. We had to go over the train tracks there. I didn't want to ruin mark's car yeah the brakes work though they work.

Well, oh man. This is addicting, so obviously it's not the fastest car in the world. 170 horsepower naturally aspirated four-cylinder uh, but it revs up high. It sounds cool and you just feel like you're in like a little 80s race car, because you kind of are you're in the street version of this.

But that's what this car was based on. Uh was the 190e evolution, and that was the straight-up race car version of this. So they made them for the street, which is really cool before amg, so mercedes could do their own performance stuff before they officially became partners with amg and bought them out, and this is it so. This is a non-amg car.

So this lap timer is factory and it does work not really exactly sure how we should be able to figure out this 80s technology. Is there a youtube video on this dude? I need to? Oh, oh, oh, i need to race. I need a race here. We go here.

We go, let's see how long it takes to get to the end of the street here in the 190e 7000 rpm all right we're going to call that the end of the street 21 seconds 21 no 25 seconds. Stop! Stop! Stop all right! Now! You guys had absolutely no contacts there at all. I don't even know how far i went, but we used the lap timer in the 190 and that's all that matters and i'm really liking this. I really do like this transmission for the second and third race track feature here, so we're in the third match and then right back into third.

I love it all right, so i know it's not the fastest car in the world, but it is addicting. It's so controllable because it doesn't have a ton of power. You're, not fish, tailing all over the place, but man does it handle so nice. So nice, i'm gon na, remember which gear i'm in here there's cds and tapes that are just flying all over the place.

So this 190e only has one option: the sunroof, it doesn't have heated seats, it doesn't have the rear, headrests they're, just not there at all um and i believe those were the only options. I'd have to go back and watch uh. The doug demiro video from like three years ago, but i think he said those were the only three options you could get on one of these cars and they made about 19 000 of these uh 16 valve 2.3 liter sportier 190 ease, as opposed to, like a Million other 190es. This car was really what brought people into the entry level of mercedes.

This is what made it possible for people that didn't have a ton of money to own the brand and then from there. They could eventually lead into buying the more expensive model. So this was a very, very important car. The 201 was one of the most important cars before mercedes-benz, because this started a tradition for people to buy these cars.

Then maybe they bought the e-class after that and possibly an s-class and so on. So the 190e. Although to today's standard, isn't the coolest car in the world, the history behind it is very, very important for the brand oh getting the thumbs up right now, so this thing might not be the fastest, but that is a plaid model. S cruising by and there you have it: a 1987 190 e with the 16 valve 2.3 liter and the manual transmission, the dog leg transmission, the rear bucket seats, though this everything, the lap timer just this car embodies german 1980s.

I love the fact that it's here at legit street quarters and i got a chance to not only drive it, which was a blast but also work on it. I know we didn't do a lot, but it's always fun. Inspecting a car like this, seeing what it's got under the skin, this thing has quite a few very interesting mechanical aspects like the transmission like the self leveling in the rear, and this one has been tastefully modified as well, so they didn't go too crazy, but it Does handle really well even with a bad steering shock um because of the springs and the shocks and everything that they added so a very well-rounded car. That is now in the hands of mark from young timers and he's going to keep this thing pristine.

And if you guys want to see more on the 190e make sure to follow young timers garage here on youtube and on instagram i'll, probably post up some pictures as well at legit streetcars on all the social media outlets. So i hope you enjoyed this review done in the legit streetcars way and if you did hit that thumbs up button share the video subscribe if you're new and most importantly, have an awesome day i'll catch. All of you in the next video you.