Beauty and Beast, This Mercedes SLR McLaren Stirling Moss Brought Record Money

It looks like a wild, wonderful concept car, slapped together by Mercedes-Benz to gin up publicity on the show circuit, elicit superlatives from auto writers, and play on ’50s racing nostalgia. Remarkably, though, Mercedes actually put this silver speedster into production.

Well, barely. It sold just 75 copies, only to loyal customers of the McLaren SLR model upon which they’re based. At nearly $1M when new in 2009, they were always ultra-exclusive, but they’re even more exclusive now. This one just sold at auction for €3,355,000 ($3,643,195), a new record.

The full name of this thing is a mouthful—Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR Stirling Moss. But it’s a car with a lot to say. The last part of its designation, of course, refers to the late, great Sir Stirling Moss, while the car itself is a nod to the 300SLR he drove to win the 1955 Mille Miglia, one of the most famous motorsports performances of all time. Mercedes-Benz had already been milking the Moss/Mille Miglia theme in the late 2000s with the SLR 722 and 722 S (“722” was Moss’ race number in the 1955 event, tied to his starting time of 7:22 a.m.). But the SLR Stirling Moss took things up a notch and served as a sort of last hurrah for the SLR McLaren line that launched back in 2003 and was wrapping up in 2010.

In turning the SLR (a nearly two-ton grand tourer) into a roofless, pillarless, windshield-less race car for the road, Mercedes-Benz shed over 400 pounds in weight and reskinned it in a carbon-fiber body penned by Korean designer Yoon Il-hun that borrows a few styling cues, including the side-exit exhaust, from the original 300SLR race car. The interior, by Dutch designer Sarkis Benliyan, is a mix of carbon fiber and stitched leather, and a tonneau cover attaches over the passenger’s seat when there’s nobody in there.

The SLR Stirling Moss retained the regular car’s 641-hp, 5.4-liter supercharged V-8 and five-speed automatic transmission, which are enough to get the low-slung Silver Arrow to 60 mph in the 3-second range and to a top speed of 217 mph. It all added up to one of the coolest and prettiest cars of the 2000s, even if most people have never seen one.

Naturally, given their extreme cost, low production, and serious impracticality (goggles while driving are a must, a helmet even better), it was natural for many of these SLR Stirling Moss cars to wind up in collections with owners who seldom use them and never sell them. The one at the RM Sotheby’s auction in Tegernsee, Germany, for example, showed just 45 km (28 miles) and looked to be in essentially new condition. It is also only the fourth one to ever sell at auction (six others have been offered at auction since 2015, but none met reserve). The first one to ever make an auction appearance brought €2,300,000 ($2.6M) back in 2016. Another brought €2,617,200 ($2.9M) in 2019, and one more sold for $3,211,250 earlier this year.

That $3.2M car, though, racked up 9233 km (5737 miles) on its odometer, which gets respect from me but arguably diminished value from potential buyers. Just for some fun napkin math, and without factoring auction fees, taxes, registration, etc., the difference in price between the 5737-mile car and this 28-mile car comes out to about $76 per mile. Not that anybody would (or should) be thinking about money when blasting along in this rolling sculpture with the wind in their hair. And face. And teeth.