An extraordinarily rare Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR enters auction. It is expected to sell for approximately 10 million U.S. dollars.
Mercedes-Benz and AMG designed the CLK GTR in the 1990s and intended to throw it in the FIA GT Championship series in 1997. In order to achieve homologation and race, it needed street-legal variants. Thus the very limited production series of road-going cars are considered to be racing cars for the road.
The car makers built 26 street-legal CLK GTR units, with 20 coupes and six roadsters. The model entering the Gooding & Company’s auction is one of the 20. It is actually number 9 of a total of 26. Hermann-Dieter Eschmann, a share-holder of Bohler-Uddeholm, one of the world’s biggest steel supplier at that time, bought it as new in Germany. He kept the car until 2005. He then sold it to a private collector in Hong Kong.
Twelve years later, in 2017, Cheval Trust from Seattle purchased the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR and imported it under the Show or Display exemption.
The odometer of the model currently shows only 1.442 kilometers (896 miles).
The next owner of the iconic automobile will also get a battery charger, a socket set and wooden blocks that it can rest on. Complete service records are also part of the offer. Gooding & Company is expecting to get between $8.5 and $10 million.
The Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR in figures
The Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR comes with an AMG-sourced 6.9-liter naturally aspirated V12. The unit delivers 612 horsepower and 775 Nm of torque. It makes the car accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) in just 3.8 seconds. Its top speed is 344 km/h (214 mph).
A 6-speed sequential manual transmission manages resources.
The car measures 4.854 millimeters (191.1 inches) in length, 1.951 millimeters (76.8 inches) in width and 1.102 millimeters (43.4 inches) in height. Its wheelbase is of 2.670 millimeters (105.1 inches).
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