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Record price for ’96 Mercedes-Benz SL500 after owner loses the key

12 April, 2017

Picture this: it’s 1996, you’ve just received your brand-new Mercedes-Benz SL500 and taken it for a brisk drive around a few blocks. 80-miles now adorns the odometer and you park it up to go about your business, returning to find the key has gone walkabouts. Would you then call it a day and never drive it again?

That’s exactly what the owner of this particular example did, and it recently sold for a record price 21 years later— £56,640 to be exact — by Coys at their Spring Classics auction at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London.  

Chris Routledge, CEO of Coys, said, “This is a fantastic price bearing in mind that a normal version of this car, with reasonable mileage, would probably be worth 20% of what this SL500 made today. An exciting sale and a new world record!”

The Mercedes-Benz SL500 R129 roadsters were produced from 1989 through 2002, featuring many innovative details for the time, such as electronically controlled damping and a hidden, automatically extending roll-over bar, electric windows and mirrors.

This is one of the more powerful and sought after M119 engined cars and also boasts a number of optional factory extras, including heated front seats, 6 CD multi-changer, upgraded radio and wood-leather steering wheel.

It’s far too nice to call a barn find … perhaps a time capsule, if you will? Either way, £56,640 is a staggering win for the owner.

Almost mythical pony

25 July, 2024

The Shelby came to our shores in 2003. It went from the original New Zealand owner to an owner in Auckland. Malcolm just happened to be in the right place with the right amount of money in 2018 and a deal was done. Since then, plenty of people have tried to buy it off him. The odometer reads 92,300 miles. From the condition of the car that seems to be correct and only the first time around.
Malcolm’s car is an automatic. It has the 1966 dashboard, the back seat, the rear quarter windows and the scoops funnelling air to the rear brakes.
He even has the original bill of sale from October 1965 in California.

Becoming fond of Fords part two – happy times with Escorts

17 July, 2024

In part one of this Ford-flavoured trip down memory lane I recalled a sad and instructive episode when I learned my shortcomings as a car tuner, something that tainted my appreciation of Mk2 Ford Escort vans in particular. Prior to that I had a couple of other Ford entanglements of slightly more redeeming merit. There were two Mk1 Escorts I had got my hands on: a 1972 1300 XL belonging to my father and a later, end-of-line, English-assembled 1974 1100, which my partner and I bought from Panmure Motors Ford in Auckland in 1980. Both those cars were the high water mark of my relationship with the Ford Motor Co. I liked the Mk1 Escorts. They were nice, nippy, small cars, particularly the 1300, which handled really well, and had a very precise gearbox for the time.
Images of Jim Richards in the Carney Racing Williment-built Twin Cam Escort and Paul Fahey in the Alan Mann–built Escort FVA often loomed in my imagination when I was driving these Mk1 Escorts — not that I was under any illusion of comparable driving skills, but they had to be having just as much fun as I was steering the basic versions of these projectiles.