No Bond car has ever done anything as outrageous on screen as transform itself into a submarine; none except for this Lotus in the epic The Spy Who Loved Me. Breaking with tradition, Q is never given the opportunity to explain the car’s features to 007. So, when the Lotus is fired off a jetty into the sea, the audience was stunned, and captivated…
Blue Chip Market Update : Prices and Trends
In late April, RM Auctions sold a mint Ferrari 330 GTS for nearly $2 million. One month later a one-off Aston DB4 GT (the very cool Bertone-designed Jet) found a new home for a shade under $5 million, just a couple weeks before a Ferrari 340/375MM sold for $13+ million at Villa d’Este. Then Bonhams blew those prices out of the water when a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 F1 brought $29.6+ million, setting a world record price for a car at auction…
David Douglas Duncan and “The Secret SLS”
Prototypes are the products of an intense automotive design process. They are ideas given physical form and meant to test the culmination of those ideas. Most serve their purpose and end as scrap or become forgotten embodiments of a larger production that ends up relegated to a warehouse collecting dust rarely, if ever, to be seen again. Occasionally one is found on flaccid tires, fading away in a dusty, shuttered garage, whereupon aficionados immediately elevate it from “ancient junk” to “treasured artifact.”
1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SLS : Father of the Brood by Winston Goodfellow
This car is the starting point of a multi-generation automotive legend, to which 500,000 cars can trace their genes. It is the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SLS and, like most of its ‘children’ — every sporting Merc that has followed — chassis 8427198118/1 is a stupendous drive…
2013 Monterey Auctions : Recap
2013 Monterey Auctions : Recap Rare Ferrari sets world record with $27.5-million sale! Click the image above to read the article Links to Full Auction Results RM Auctions Gooding & Company Bonhams Quail Lodge Cars Are Sculpted Fine Art Click the image
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2013 Monterey Auctions : Preview
2013 Monterey Auctions : Preview Gooding & Co. and RM once again headline the massive collector car auction extravaganza weekend in Monterrey! Links for auction catalogues Gooding & Company RM Mecum Russo and Steele Bonhams Quail Lodge 300 SL’s For Sale This Weekend
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1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Prototype – Vintage Project Part II
Vintage Project, Part II 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Prototype By Scott Grundfor Body Check Restoration begins with an analysis of the car, obviously easiest if it runs and is in one piece. By simply walking around a car looking at various parts, you may be able
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The Zero Mile Gullwing By Dennis Adler & Scott Grundfor
“The Star” Magazine, January/February 1997 Every so often something truly amazing comes along in the automotive world. In 1954 it was the Mercedes-Benz 300SL, a sports car so strikingly advanced that it became the symbol of Mercedes’ postwar renaissance. Among countless Americans moved by the
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1954 300SL Prototype By Scott Grundfor
The 1954 300SL Prototype is an icon, and the year 1955 was magical for Daimler-Benz, never to be equaled by any other marque. Their teams won four championships: the Formula One championship with Fangio driving, the World Sports Car Championship with Moss, Fangio, and Kling; an
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The Italian Mercedes-Benz, Part 2 By Dennis Adler
The first of two Pinin Farina concept cars, known affectionately as the Italian Mercedes-Benz, built in 1955 and 1956 on the 300-series chassis was featured in our January/February issue. The body design of that 300b-based 1955 Coupe was far more complicated than this second version,
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