Fangio’s 1954 Mercedes W196R F1 car sells for £19.6 million (video)

Fangio’s 1954 Mercedes W196R F1 (pictured) sells for £19 million

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is all about cars and performance, but it’s not just cars on the ground and on the hillclimb.

Goodwood is a Mecca for wealthy petrolheads as well as those who can only lust after the finest motoring metal – classic and current – so it’s a sensible place to run an auction for high-end cars. And you can’t get much more ‘high-emd- – at least in terms of value – than Juan Manuel Fangio’s 1954 Mercedes W196R Formula One car which went under the hammer yesterday at Bonham’s Goodwood auction, and reached a world record auction price of £19,601,500 (including premium – £17.5m before).

That makes Fangio’s Mercdes F1 the most expensive car ever to be sold in auction, beating the 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa Prototype which sold at Goodings Pebble Beach auction in 2011 for £10,086,400.

The Fangio Mercedes F1 is an important car – and, delightfully, still bearing the scars of its racing history – because it gave Mercedes their first post-war back-to-back wins and was the first F1 car to use fuel injection, independent suspension, tubular spaceframe, inboard brakes and a straight eight.

It was also the first Mercedes F1 W196 open-wheeled W196 variant, allowing Fangio to place the car more accurately, which lead to chassis 00006 winning the German Grand Prix and the floowing Swiss Grand Prix.

It’s a stunning price for any car, but the Fangio F1 car – although it set a new auction record – is still a way off setting the all-time record for a car.

That currently belongs to the ex-Stirling Moss Ferrari 250 GTO which sold last year for $35 million and now, with that benchmark set, the next Ferrari 250 GTO sale will probably be somewhere north of $45 million.

By Cars UK