- A rare Mercedes-Benz has sold at auction for almost $54 million
- The car is a W196 Grand Prix car raced by Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss
- The car was sold by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum which is raising funds for its upkeep and expansion
A new record price has been set for a Grand Prix race car, one that’s unlikely to be rivaled anytime soon.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, in an effort to raise funds for its upkeep and expansion, has consigned auction house RM Sotheby’s to sell an array of some of its most desirable cars in its collection.
One of them is a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 race car, piloted in its prime by both Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, and it just sold at a special auction held on Feb. 1 at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, for 51.155 million euros (approximately $53.9 million), including the buyer’s premium.
The final bid was 46.5 million euros, which was close to the pre-auction estimate of 50 million euros.
The most expensive Grand Prix car previously sold at auction was another Fangio-driven 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196, which fetched $29.6 million in 2013.
Another W196, built for sports car racing but never driven in anger, remains the most expensive car ever sold at auction. The car is the 1955 Mercedes 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe, which sold for 135 million euros in 2022.
Juan Manuel Fangio
The W196 Grand Prix cars were developed to meet the new regulations for engines with a displacement of up to 2.5 liters introduced in 1954, and they dominated racetracks around Europe, including in the early seasons of Formula 1, thanks in part to the driving of legends like Fangio and Moss.
The W196’s engine, code-named the M196, was a purpose-developed inline-8 initially rated at 257 hp, which was gradually improved over two seasons to 290 hp. The engine sat up front and powered the rear wheels via a rear-mounted 5-speed manual transmission actuated by a single-disc dry clutch.
1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 bearing chassis no. 00009/54 – Photo via RM Sotheby’s
The example that was just sold, which bears chassis number 00009/54, originally featured the typical open-wheel design of Grand Prix cars. Fangio raced it in that configuration at a non-points race in Buenos Aires in 1954. The car was then fitted with its current streamliner bodywork for the 1955 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, where it was driven by Moss. After the 1955 season, Mercedes used it as a practice and test car before donating it to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in 1965.
By that time, Mercedes had been out of top-level motorsport for a decade. The automaker withdrew from competition following the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans disaster, in which Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes 300 SLR vaulted into a grandstand, killing Levegh and scores of spectators. It’s why the 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe built that year never ended up racing. The W196 would be the last factory-run Mercedes Grand Prix car until the W01 F1 car of 2010, although Mercedes had been supplying power units to McLaren and other F1 teams before that.
