OK, watches are our thing, but we love a great car, too. Just yesterday, Bonhams sold a 1954 Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 car for an astounding £19,601,500, or roughly $29,604,145.45 by today's exchange rates. This is a world-record for a car sold at auction, usurping the title from a prototype Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa in 2011 at JUST $16 million. Not surprisingly, this car isn't just a pretty face...it has quite a story behind it.The 1954 Formula 1 car was driven by argentine Juan Manuel Fangio on July 4, 1954 at the Reims-Gueux circuit in France. It was the first race Mercedes-Benz had competed in since the pre-war years, and Fangio and his teammate Karl Klink finished first and second in the French Grand Prix. This race marked the return of power-house Mercedes to Formula 1, and the fears of the two leading Italian teams - Ferrari and Maserati - realized.
The entirely new style of silver race car astonished both fans at Reims and competitors, and Mercedes would go on to win not only the German GP at the Nürburgring and the Swiss GP, clinching Fangio's second Drivers' World Championship title within two month's time. Over the next 14 months Fangio would drive this car in 12 races, winning nine of them.The W196 Benzes were so dominant that finally, on October 16, 1955, after Stirling Moss and Peter Collins won the Targa Florio in Sicily to add the Sports Car title to Fangio's Formula 1 Drivers' crown, team manager Alfred Neubauer received a letter from Fritz Nallinger, Daimler-Benz AG's main board Director of Research and Design. Neubauer read: "After mature deliberation the management committee has decided...to absent itself...irrevocably from motor racing for several years".The reason? They had absolutely nothing left to prove.
Years later, chief MB engineer Rudi Uhlenhaut said "Believe me...I do not speak propaganda. But when we returned to racing in the mid-1950s, our directive was to be the best, and to win both the Formula 1 Drivers' Championship, and the Sports Car Championship. We did that, and - while we could have done better – when our board took the decision to withdraw, we were the best".Tough to argue with that.
This particular car is in barn-find like condition, almost completely to original specifications. This car could be described as the archetypal Mercedes-Benz, and it marked Germany's resurgence on the world-class sports landscape. Its innovation, performance, and emotional meaning to both Germany and the world at large are hard to measure. The final sale price of the 1954 Mercede-Benz W196R Formula 1 Racing Chassis no 196 010 00006/54 was £19,601,500 (including premium) when the hammer fell at Bonhams' Festival of Speed auction yesterday, making it the most valuable car ever sold publicly.
