Mercedes-Benz W196 Fangio-Driven Could Fetch $70M

A 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 raced by the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss will soon be available to car collectors with deep pockets.
 

This rare Mercedes is one of several cars the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum is selling to raise funds for its upkeep. Others include a 1966 Ford GT40 Mk II, a 1957 Chevrolet Corvette SS Project XP64, a 1928 Bugatti Type 35B, a 1991 Benetton B191 Formula 1 car raced by Michael Schumacher, and a 1964 Ferrari 250 LM that won overall at Le Mans.
 
RM Sotheby’s is handling the sale of the cars and has confirmed that the W196 will be sold at a special event on Feb. 1 at the official Mercedes museum in Stuttgart, Germany. The auction house estimates the car will sell for more than 50 million euros (approximately $51.5 million).
 
Even that sum wouldn’t make the car the most expensive sold at auction. In 2022, a 1955 Mercedes 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe, one of only two built, sold for $143 million at a charity auction.
 

The W196, bearing chassis number 00009/54, will be only the second W196 to come up for public sale. Another Fangio-raced W196 sold for $29.7 million at auction in 2013. That car, which featured open-wheel bodywork instead of the “streamliner” shape seen here, was driven by Fangio to his first Formula 1 win with Mercedes at the 1954 German Grand Prix. Fangio also won the 1954 Swiss Grand Prix in that car.
 
Fangio was one of the first stars of F1 in its earliest years, competing from the inaugural season in 1950. He won five championships, a record that stood for 46 years until Schumacher surpassed it. Even today, only Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton have won more championships than Fangio, each with seven titles.
 
While Fangio won championships with no fewer than four constructors, much of his success came behind the wheel of the W196, which was introduced for the 1954 racing season and carried the Argentinian to the championship that year. It was a sophisticated car for its time, boasting a 2.5-liter inline-8 engine laid over on its side to reduce frontal area. The engine featured desmodromic valves and mechanical direct injection, allowing it to develop 257 hp.
 

The W196 up for sale was originally built as an open-wheel car, like most Grand Prix racers. Fangio raced it in this configuration at a non-points race in Buenos Aires in 1954. The car was then fitted with its current streamliner bodywork for the 1955 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, where it was driven by Moss. After the 1955 season, Mercedes used it as a practice and test car before donating it to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in 1965.
 
By that time, Mercedes had been out of top-level motorsport for a decade. The automaker withdrew from competition following the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans disaster, in which Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes 300 SLR vaulted into a grandstand, killing Levegh and scores of spectators. The W196 would be the last factory-run Mercedes F1 car until the W01 of 2010, although Mercedes had been supplying power units to McLaren and other F1 teams before that.
 
While it is an important piece of racing history, the W196 doesn’t have a direct connection to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and falls outside the museum’s focus. All museums have limited resources to care for artifacts, and selling or removing less-relevant pieces is a common process.