Mercedes-Benz W196: Fangio’s $53m Silver Arrow

1. Mercedes-Benz W196 Stromlinienwagen

Year 1954 / Price $52.96m (£42.75m)

This was a sale so big it literally commanded its own auction. In February of this year, this Mercedes-Benz W196 R, as raced to victory by Juan Manuel Fangio, became the most valuable grand prix car ever to sell at auction.

The 1960s single-seater, cloaked in sleek slipstreamer bodywork, sold for €51.155m (£42.75m) after an intense bidding war at an RM Sotheby’s sale in Stuttgart where it was the only lot. The hammer price is more than double the previous auction record for a Formula 1 car of £19m, set by a non-streamliner W196 back in 2013. It was also the second-highest sum ever paid for any car at auction, behind another Mercedes – the 300 SLR ‘Uhlenhaut’ Coupe that sold for €135m in 2022.

“What a thrilling auction that was!” said Marcus Breitschwerdt, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Heritage, after watching the bidding war between several buyers both in person and on phones. “I congratulate the lucky buyer. Very few Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrows are privately owned.”

As well as winning at the hands of Fangio in the 1955 non-championship Buenos Aires Grand Prix, the streamliner was used by Stirling Moss to set the fastest lap at Monza.

Mercedes donated the car to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in 1965, which put the car up for sale at the February 2025 auction.

The Indianapolis circuit operators were offering additional cars from its collection in the hope of raising £100m to both secure the financial future of its museum and also streamline its collection to become more US-focused.

“It’s hard to describe the significance of this sale,” said Gord Duff, global head of auctions for RM Sotheby’s. “This car is simply one of the most important racing cars in history and it’s an honour for RM Sotheby’s to sell it so successfully to benefit the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.”

The W196 was developed by Mercedes to enter the 1954 world championship, the first time the Silver Arrows had entered grand prix racing since WWII. The car proved a revelation, as the team claimed a 1-2 on its debut at the 1954 French GP at Reims, Fangio heading home Karl Kling.

The Argentinian would use the car to claim the ’54 and ’55 titles, the Merc winning nine of the 12 world championship GPs it entered. Fangio drove W196 chassis number 00009/54, the one being auctioned, minus the streamlined bodywork during victory at a home non-championship race in Buenos Aires at the start of the ’55 season. Having claimed a famous Argentine GP win two weeks earlier, the Formula Libre Buenos Aires event was used by Mercedes to do further in-race testing.

Held over two 30-lap heats, Fangio would finish 10.5sec behind Giuseppe Farina in the opening round, before coming home second again in the next. However, once the times were combined a margin of 11.9sec over young team-mate Moss and more than half a minute on the Ferrari of Farina was enough to secure the win on the aggregate result.

But after the introduction of a new short-wheelbase W196 thereafter, the streamliner became a rare sight. While it had been mighty at Reims, a circuit with only three real corners, it proved ineffective at tracks with mid-speed and fast turns, showing a tendency to understeer.

It appeared at two further races in 1954: the British and Italian GPs, then made a return at Monza in 1955 when the longer-wheelbase chassis 54 was fitted with streamliner bodywork and brought back for Moss, the car running second and setting the fastest lap before the Brit had to retire with reliability issues.

This would be the final world championship appearance for chassis 54. Mercedes withdrew from motorsport activities at the end of the year after the 1955 Le Mans disaster when driver Pierre Levegh crashed into the crowd, killing himself and 83 spectators.

Chassis 54 remained in Stuttgart until it was donated – still in its stromlinienwagen bodywork – by Mercedes in 1965 to the then-new IMS Museum, where it has remained ever since.

The Mercedes is the first of an 11-car collection being sold which also includes the 1965 Le Mans-winning Ferrari 250 LM and Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America Land Speed Record contender (see page 155).

IMS hopes to raise £95m from the combined sale, with the restoration of its museum set for completion in April 2025.

“The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum has been honoured to care for and share the W196 R within our museum, but the sum it has achieved today is a transformative contribution to increase our endowment and long-term sustainability as well as the restoration and expansion of our collection,” said museum president Joe Hale.

The Mercedes-Benz W196

Great racing cars

A veteran of Formula 1 design with a career spanning Williams, Brabham, Benetton and Sauber, Sergio Rinland casts his eye over what made this vintage Silver Arrow special.

“The 1954 Mercedes was fantastic in every aspect everyone, except for the driver, could not see! Remember that famous photo of Fangio hitting the oil drum at Silverstone? It was the ultimate F1 car really, way ahead of its time. It was simple and refined and of course it took Fangio to his third title. They were so far ahead of the opposition it was ridiculous. For an Argentinian like me it is nice to see our hero winning in one of the all-time greatest F1 designs.

The 2.5-litre normally aspirated engine had direct injection, which is what we have now in F1, 60 years later. It was the first car to have this so it was way ahead of the development curve in F1 at that time.

It had the inboard brakes and the engine was designed on the side to lower the line of the car, to be able to sit the driver on the floor. Again, something that none of the opposition even thought about until much later really.

It used new technologies like fuel injection and it was quick and reliable, winning nine of the 12 races it entered. And that is why I probably would not choose anything from the last 20-30 years, even when I was involved in F1. There were too many restrictions even then for those to be my true favourite grand prix cars.

Every time I see the Mercedes-Benz W196 I look at it in wonder and awe. For the time in which it was designed and built, it is like a car from a different, future era. When you measure it against the Maserati 250F, which incidentally was a fantastic car and looked beautiful, there is no comparison from a technical perspective.

I remember Fangio saying it was not that easy to drive but you were always sure it would not break. That says a lot about the difference between German engineering and what other countries were doing at the time.

It would have been interestingly to see if Mercedes would have dominated grand prix racing had it not been for the Le Mans tragedy. In the 1960s we had lovely Formula 1 cars. I mean those 1500cc cars were absolute jewels, but jewels of simplicity. Mercedes was on a different level entirely and probably would have cleaned up for as long as it wanted to.”