This Friday, one of the most valuable race cars of all time will be auctioned off to the highest bidder at the 2013 Goodwood Festival of Speed. The race car going up for bid is the Mercedes-Benz Type W 196 R Grand Prix racing car – a car that won two consecutive F1 races in 1954, the German and Swiss Grand Prix. The W 196 R Grand Prix Mercedes race car was driven by Formula 1 World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio, a dominating force in the Formula 1 world that won the drivers world champion five times and is better known as El Maestro.
Five-times world champion Juan Manuel Fangio, who formed a man-machine unit with his W 196 R in his active years, was famous not only for his gifted driving style but also for his dry sense of humo
The one-of-a-kind race car has hardly been seen since the 80’s after it left the hands of Daimler and the Mercedes-Benz Museum and was purchased by a private collector. “This is the only Mercedes-Benz W196 in private hands. It is the only surviving Mercedes-Benz W196 to have won not just one World Championship Grand Prix, but two,” said a spokesperson from Bonham. “Its stature is immense, not only as the iconic Fangio car of the 1950s, but also as a shining star of pinnacle Mercedes-Benz engineering and as an icon of postwar recovery.”
This will certainly be an auction to watch.
UPDATE: Juan Manuel Fangio’s Mercedes W 196 R Grand Prix racer sold at auction for a record breaking $29,619,826. In case you’re stunned by that number, that’s nearly $30 Million US Dollars, nearly double the previous auction record of $16.39 million for a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa sold at Pebble Beach in 2011.
