The Twelve Million Dollar Mercedes: 1903 ex-racer becomes the most expensive pre-1930 car ever sold

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An historic car breaking the once-astonishing million-dollar barrier at auction is perhaps not such big news anymore, and, indeed, there were several 1960s supercars selling for millions in Gooding & Co’s latest sale at Amelia Island last week, but it was a Mercedes 60hp of 1903 vintage which was to be the strongest seller of them all. The car changed owners for the first time in 121 years when it was hammered down at a staggering $12,105,000 (approx. £9,500,000), making it the most expensive pre-1930 car ever sold.

It is certainly quite a special vehicle. One of five surviving examples of its type, the 60hp is powered by a  9¼-litre, four-cylinder engine and, while capable of 80mph, is said to be very easy to handle. From the auctioneer’s blurb: “The new Mercedes-Simplex 60hp was the first true dual-purpose automobile—a powerful, reliable touring car that could also win races. Between 1903 and 1905, the 60hp convincingly cemented its status as the finest, fastest production car in the world, winning countless speed trials, hill climbs, and circuit races.”

This beautiful specimen was sold new to British publishing magnate Alfred C. W. Harmsworth, who owned both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, controlling much of Britain’s newspaper circulation during the early part of the 20th century. Harmsworth also owned a great number of cars, which he kept at the coach house of Northcliffe his mansion in Broadstairs, on the Kent coast. There were several Gardner-Serpollet steam cars and a Locomobile, Daimler, single-cylinder Renault, 12hp Panhard and Mercedes-Simplex 40hp, believed to be the first Mercedes sold in England. He had this 60hp car delivered to Nice in France and immediately entered it in competitions; it set the fastest times at Nice Speed Week and, later in 1903, Castlewellan Hill-Climb.

Another Mercedes 60hp famously won that year’s Gordon Bennett Cup in Ireland, in the hands of Belgian racer Camille Jenatzy. As a matter of fact the Harmsworth car served as the team’s reserve vehicle. Still in 1903, the Simplex was rebodied by J. Rothschild et Fils. of Paris in similar in its present Roi-des-Belges style. After that very few changes were made besides a spruce-up in the mid-1950s, and despite thereafter becoming a fixture at the Montagu Motor Museum (the National Motor Museum from 1972) in Beaulieu, the car would stay in the Harmsworth family until the sale at the beginning of March.

The auctioneer said: “Since its delivery to Nice in the spring of 1903, this remarkable Mercedes has been cherished, preserved, and passed down among three generations of the Harmsworth family. It is not only the sole example of the model that remains in single family ownership, but also the lone surviving 60hp Mercedes that claims a documented, in-period competition history.”

The nearest any other pre-Great War car has come to such an eye-watering result was the 1912 Simplex 50hp tourer, purchased by Harold Vanderbilt for tennis player Eleonora Sears, which was auctioned last year by Bonhams at Pebble Beach for $4,845,000. That car was "offered direct from 111 years of single family ownership."

Words: Jeroen Booij; pictures: Gooding & Company
 

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