This car, Lot 164, sold for $3,753,526 (€3,605,000), including buyer’s premium, at RM Sotheby’s Munich, DEU, auction, on November 23, 2024.
In the old-car hobby, there are multiple purposes for choosing to buy a particular car. Among other things: lust, excitement, driving pleasure and status. Our subject Mercedes is purely a collector car and needs to be understood within the values and constraints of that genre. By “collector,” I mean that the motivations for owning it are primarily historic preservation rather than visceral pleasure. It’s a museum piece that can be driven.
Considering collectibility
The old base maxim of antiques and collectibles is “special then, special now,” but it gets a lot more complex than that. There are a series of boxes that need to be ticked, and the more of them there are, the better the subsequent desirability and value will be. Obviously, how much of the original car is still there over 100 years later is vitally important. Interiors almost never survive, bodies seldom do, but having most of the base mechanics is important. Technical innovation is huge. The modern automobile has evolved over the past 140 years or so, and every piece of it had to be conceived and figured out before the next step could be possible. The most important cars are the ones that represented major steps in developing the technologies that we all take for granted.
From an anthropological standpoint, certain cars can be thought of as cultural relics. Through them we are allowed insights into the lives and worlds of incredible people: genius engineers solving intractable problems, masterful craftsmen rendering the concepts into working machines, incredibly brave drivers figuring out what did and didn’t work by pushing the cars to and beyond their limits. The great cars have complicated, interesting and heroic stories that attach to them, which in turn give enduring human value.
Aesthetics are a major component as well. Not unlike with humans, a form that is perceived as beautiful will attract an appreciation beyond what its physical or competitive abilities would justify. This must be adjusted to reflect both changing tastes and technical abilities. A hundred years ago, bodies were hand-formed aluminum and thus essentially simple shapes. Pre-war vehicles are an acquired taste.
Assuming a car meets the criteria above, then rarity is the value multiplier in that it compounds all the others. Being the only one ever, the only one left, or one of a very few can impart serious value. As an interesting aside, ultimate rarity can work against value in that there needs to be enough of something to create a market. If there was only one Ferrari 250 GTO, nobody would know what it was worth. With 36, there are enough of them for people to fight over. In the early-racing car world, this is resolved by having “baskets” of similar cars — in this case mid-1920s-and-earlier Mercedes racers — that can be grouped together.
A final consideration is whether the marque is important in the minds of today’s collectors. Generally, this has to do with whether the marque is still in business and considered a high-status brand. For example, Amilcar, Delage and Delahaye were all serious French competitors to Bugatti in the 1920s–30s, but few people know about them today. Collectors tend to prefer owning marques that the public lusts after.
Top-tier adjacent
Now that we’ve established a collector’s value framework, let’s look at our subject car. It is clearly a cool and highly collectible Mercedes and ticks virtually all the boxes, but it is also well shy of reaching the ultimate level. As to originality, it appears that the basic car remains original, and the ownership history doesn’t have any gaping holes. The body isn’t original (nor is the modified one that comes with it) but it is correct, and racing cars of that age almost never survive complete.
Technologically it is impressive, with twin cams, four valves per cylinder and a roller-bearing crankshaft, all of which were at the forefront of performance at the time. It should be noted that the basic design concept was pioneered by the 1914 Peugeot GP engine and subsequently “borrowed” by Mercedes, Miller and Bugatti. This car was evolution, not revolution. The 1923 racing rules required 2 liters of supercharged displacement, which from a value standpoint isn’t great. All cars to this formula were small, high-strung and fiddly — not as easy or fun to drive as naturally aspirated cars of larger engine size.
The human stories associated with this car are good but not great. It was the first factory entry at Indianapolis, but private Mercedes had participated many times before, including the initial 1911 event. It finished 8th in 1923, but behind six Millers and a Frontenac Ford, and that is basically it. American history doesn’t mean much to the primarily European market for these cars; the similar 1924 Targa Florio winner would bring easily twice the money.
The final considerations are rarity and famous lineage, and in these it excels. During the early 1920s, both the German economy and Mercedes brand were on the ropes, with little opportunity to go racing (they weren’t even allowed to race in France). So the number of racers from this era is vanishingly small (and most are found in Mercedes’ museum). There are at least a few privately owned pre-war Mercedes racers that fit the same collector group, and these are generally far more valuable. With better times in the late 1920s, Mercedes built the S, SS and SSK that re-established the company’s competitive bona fides and now form the early bookend of most serious Mercedes collections.
On the money
In summation, this Mercedes is important, technologically inventive, historically interesting, damn pretty and exceedingly rare. On the other hand, it is small, high-strung, not particularly fast, and not comfortably usable for someone who wants to participate in events. It will be an important component of somebody’s mostly static collection — revered, but not as valuable as some of its pre-war or later brothers. It was fairly bought. ♦
