A 70-year-old Mercedes raced by the likes of Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss has smashed the record for the most expensive Formula 1 car ever sold.
A W196R from the 1955 season, in closed-wheel ‘Streamliner’ configuration, sold for €51.155 million (£42.7m) at auction. It was auctioned by RM Sotheby’s at the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart, Germany.
Its sale price is more than double that of the previous record-holder, another W196, which raced in 1954. That car sold for £19.6m in 2013.
The new record-holder was last raced by Moss at the Italian Grand Prix in 1955. Mercedes built different configurations of its W196 for different circuits, favouring the ‘streamlined’ version for the fastest tracks.
However the involvement of a Mercedes in a crash at the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hours, which killed scores or spectators, led the manufacturer to withdraw from motorsport at the end of that year. It did not return to grand prix racing until 2010. Mercedes donated the car to the IMS in 1965.
Despite more than doubling the record price for an F1 car, it fell short of the highest value ever paid for an automobile. That record is held by another Mercedes, a roadgoing 300 SLR ‘Uhlenhaut’ Coupe, which a buyer paid $142m for in 2022.
The market for classic F1 cars has been very strong in recent years. A 2013 Mercedes of the type used by Lewis Hamilton to score his first grand prix victory sold for $18.8m (£15.1m) in 2023.
A wide array of classic F1 cars are due to go on sale later this year as the series’ former CEO Bernie Ecclestone is due to sell his collection which includes rare Ferraris and other famous machines. His entire collection is expected to sell for a nine-figure sum.
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