Exploring HK Engineering is a wondrous experience. The former eighth-century monastery that the company calls home sprawls across a rural corner of Upper Bavaria and feels like a small village – a mecca, if you will, for devotees of the Mercedes-Benz 300SL. Its guru Hans Kleissl spent a decade rejuvenating the historic buildings in the 1980s while simultaneously forging a reputation as the authority on the cult classic 1950s sports car.
If you’d have fired up your computer this time 20 years ago and typed ‘classic cars for sale’ into AltaVista or Yahoo, Classic Driver would have been among the few results to pop up – not that the selection would have been particularly wide, mind. Yes, in the year that brought us Armageddon and the Apple iMac, we first went online. And, remarkably, we’ve been there ever since.
