Fangio of Mercedes-Benz W196R sells for record $29,619,826

Bonhams
Mind-blowing: 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196R sold for almost 30 million $.
Update: We have watching video of the hammer falling on the Fangio W196 get. Check it out below. Looks like the car was not really on the block, but that apparently does not deter anyone... or maybe English auctioneers really can sell anything.

Mercedes-Benz W196R housing 00006/54 roared to victory in the 1954, German and Swiss Grand Prix with none other than Juan Manuel Fangio behind the steering wheel.

We do not imagine, it roared Bonhams auction block at the today's Goodwood Festival of speed (a lot at the same time reach to cover his ears would perspective cause a lot of confusion from an auctioneer), but the results were incredibly anyway: bidding reached $29,619,826 before the Hammer came down.

Yes, nearly $30,000,000. That is not quite double in the current record price paid for a car at an auction-a $16,390,000-1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa at the Pebble Beach sold in 2011.

14 Mercedes-Benz W196s produced there are 10 today-- a survival rate much better than that of the men who drove cars. But Fangio association with chassis 00006/54 makes it, well, especially. One-of-a-kind, in fact. That it is a bit of a surprise given a still privately owned.

Mercedes retained possession after it from racing, retired, but at some point the car-first was sold to a British collector then to a French collector, then to a German collector and then was bought and resold, which brings us to where we are today.

We are not sure who will now take the car home, but your wallet is considerably lighter. The fuel injected, tube-framed, open wheel legend would quite nicely in the Mercedes-Benz Museum existing quivers of the silver arrows perched. It is hard to imagine that the automakers a chance, this automotive artifact again pass; Earlier this year, when the news that the car would be auctioned broke, we have a couple Benz officials they had no interest in acquiring it. They seemed surprised that the car had reappeared, but something about a hasty would give not us (if tempting) "no comment."

So we'll see.

00006/54 Crossed the block prior to housing a few other bits of the W196 Automobilia, some accessible even for those without GDP Tuvalu at their command. A child size mobile model of the car sold for a not too shabby $8.688, although its 50cc engine can hold no candle to the 2, 5-liter version in the real deal (not that you own nothing this kind of makes her little Fangio would entrust).

A one eighth scale version of the famous car costs $5.288 and for lovers with a tough budget, a Fangio-signed photo of the driver in a W196 Grand Prix of Monaco in 1955 would sell for a mere $1,133.

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Carroll Shelby, muscle-car legend, dies at 89

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

Auto racing legend Carroll Shelby in 2009.

Carroll Shelby, the legendary car designer and champion auto racer who built the fabled Shelby Cobra sports car and injected testosterone into Ford's Mustang and Chrysler's Viper, has died. He was 89.

Shelby was one of the nation's longest-living heart transplant recipients, having received a heart on June 7, 1990, from a 34-year-old man who died of an aneurism. Shelby also received a kidney transplant in 1996 from his son, Michael.

The 1992 inductee into the Automobile Hall of Fame had homes in Los Angeles and his native east Texas.

The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.

"He's an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world," his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.

"His legacy is the diversity of his life," Messer said. "He's incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby."

Shelby first made his name behind the wheel of a car, winning France's grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race with teammate Ray Salvadori in 1959. He already was suffering serious heart problems and ran the race "with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue," Messer once noted.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Carroll Shelby poses with the 2007 Ford Shelby Mustang GT-H in 2006.

He had turned to the race-car circuit in the 1950s after his chicken ranch failed. He won dozens of races in various classes throughout the 1950s and was twice named Sports Illustrated's Driver of the Year.

Soon after his win at Le Mans, he gave up racing and turned his attention to designing high-powered "muscle cars" that eventually became the Shelby Cobra and the Mustang Shelby GT500.

The Cobra, which used Ford engines and a British sport car chassis, was the fastest production model ever made when it was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1962.

AP

Carroll Shelby sits in his race car in 1964.

A year later, Cobras were winning races over Corvettes, and in 1964 the Rip Chords had a Top 5 hit on the Billboard pop chart with "Hey, Little Cobra." ("Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike, spring, little Cobra, with all of your might. Hey, little Cobra, don't you know you're gonna shut 'em down?")

In 2007, an 800-horsepower model of the Cobra made in 1966, once Shelby's personal car, sold for $5.5 million at auction, a record for an American car.

"It's a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago," Shelby told the crowd before the sale, held in Scottsdale, Ariz.

It was Lee Iacocca, then head of Ford Motor Co., who had assigned Shelby the task of designing a fastback model of Ford's Mustang that could compete against the Corvette for young male buyers.

Turning a vehicle he had once dismissed as "a secretary car" into a rumbling, high-performance model was "the hardest thing I've done in my life," Shelby recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press.

AP

Carroll Shelby, after winning the 200-mile International Grand Prix at the Riverside Raceways, in California in 1960.

That car and the Shelby Cobra made his name a household word in the 1960s.

When the energy crisis of the 1970s limited the market for gas-guzzling high-performance cars, Shelby weathered the downturn by heading to Africa, where he operated a safari company for a dozen years.

By the time he had returned to the United States, Iacocca was running Chrysler Motors and he hired him to design the supercharged Viper sports car.

In the meantime, Shelby had also inaugurated the World Chili Cookoff competition and he began marketing Carroll Shelby Original Texas Chili.

In recent years, Shelby worked as a technical adviser on the Ford GT project and designed the Shelby Series 1 two-seat muscle car, a 21st century clone of his 1965 Cobra.

AP

The Mustang GT 350, is shown in this March 1965 file photo. The sleek fastback built by Carroll Shelby attracted high interest among sports car enthusiasts.

"I just wanted to see if I could do it one more time after a heart transplant and a kidney transplant," he once told the AP.

In 1990 he had marketed the Can-Am Spec Racer, an affordable racing car for entry-level drivers.

He created the Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation in 1991 to provide assistance for children and young people needing acute coronary and kidney care. According to its website, the foundation has helped numerous children receive needed surgery, as well as provided money for research.

Carroll Hall Shelby was born Jan. 11, 1923, in Leesburg, Texas.

During World War II he was an Army Air Corps flight instructor who corresponded with his fiancee by dropping love letters stuck into his flying boots onto her farm.

After leaving the military in 1945, he started a dump truck business, then decided to raise chickens. The poultry business initially flourished, with Shelby earning a $5,000 profit on the first batch of broilers he delivered. He went broke, however, when his second flock died of disease.

A friend then invited him to become an amateur racer and his success led to his joining the Aston-Martin team and competing in races all over the world.

Shelby is survived by his three children, Patrick, Michael and Sharon; his sister Anne Shelby Ellison; and his wife, Cleo.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Shelby leaves behind smokin' legend of sports cars

Courtesy of Shelby American, Inc

Carroll Shelby behind the wheel of a Cobra, the wickedly fast car that he designed.

So death finally overtook cantankerous ol’ Shel. It was a hell of a contest, begun in the 1950s, when Carroll Shelby, who went on to fame and fortune as a sports-car builder, had to take nitroglycerin tablets while driving race cars to keep his iffy heart pumping.

He drove hard almost until the end. At the media introduction of the Shelby GT500 at the New York Auto Show in 2005, I asked how things were going at home in Texas. Not good, he said. The then-82-year-old had just gotten a speeding ticket. “Them sumbitches down in Texas are gettin’ as bad as the sumbitches in California,” he growled.

Against stiff odds, he made it to 1990 with his weak heart before getting a donor's heart that finally quit nearly a quarter-century later. In 1996, his son donated Shelby a kidney. There was a time when the two threatened to scavenge spare body parts from anyone who had the misfortune to expire on the premises of the Shelby American Inc. shop in Las Vegas.

Shelby was best known for his eponymous sports cars, most particularly the fearsome 427 Cobra, a car that resulted from mating a big-block 427-cubic-inch Ford V8 engine with the chassis and bodywork of a diminutive English sports car, the AC Ace. Over the years Shelby’s car production evolved from the original Cobra line to include the GT350 and GT500, which were modified Ford Mustangs.

For a time in the 1980s he sold hot-rodded, turbocharged Chrysler economy cars – their “GLH” moniker stood for “Goes Like Hell” -- that were the precursors of the sport-compact-car movement epitomized by customized Honda Civics.

Shelby also pioneered the modern notion of intellectual property protection and licensing, spawning simultaneous industries licensing his name and designs on the one hand, and sending lawyers after unlicensed knockoffs on the other.

While this earned him a reputation for seeking credit where it might not have been due, I found just the opposite while researching a book on the Dodge Viper sports car. He didn’t want credit for others’ work, only credit -- and payment -- for his own.

Shelby was frequently credited for contributing to the Viper, which was an overt homage to his original Cobra, down to its serpent-inspired name. But he said he had done nothing to help design or build the car, except intercede on the car’s behalf with his longtime collaborator at Ford and Chrysler, then-Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca.

“I said, ‘I’ll go talk to Iacocca,’ because he had been turning us down for a long time,” Shelby recalled. “So we bulls---ted him that we could do it for about $20 million. He OK’d it, but I had to meet with him and tell him we were on budget – until we got enough money in it he couldn’t back out.”

But you don’t typically plop down on the scene in an industry like the car business and achieve success without some credentials, and Shelby had them. What did Shelby do? What didn’t he do?

He was a pilot during World War II, but spent the war stateside because they made him an instructor. In the '50s he was a three-time U.S. champion sports car racer, drove for the Aston Martin team in Europe and won the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans race as a driver. Sports Illustrated twice named him “Driver of the Year.”

During this time he earned his reputation as the racing chicken rancher, when he sped from tending his animals directly to a race, and drove still wearing his bib overalls.

He was forced from the cockpit by his heart problems in 1960 and moved on to car building, producing the first Cobra in 1962 after cutting his first deal with Iacocca when he was at Ford.

In addition to building and selling sports cars, Shelby’s company also raced them, developing the Cobra Daytona Coupe derivative of the open-top Cobra roadster and then the dominant Ford GT40. The latter was a weapon specifically devised by Ford and wielded by Shelby for the purpose of defeating Enzo Ferrari’s red sports cars at Le Mans in a cost-is-no-object campaign fueled by Henry Ford II’s ego and money. Shelby’s team won in 1966 and ’67.

Shelby’s cars were so popular in the mid-‘60s that in 1966 you could rent a Shelby GT-350H from Hertz. Bill Cosby was the car-nut Jerry Seinfeld equivalent of that era, driving a custom-built Cobra that he worked into his comedy routine as the “200 miles per hour” bit.

The ‘70s weren’t kind to cars or racing, and Shelby collected a fat check from Ford in exchange for the opportunity for the company to bastardize Shelby’s legacy with atrocities like the 1978 Mustang II King Cobra.

Shelby returned to his Texas roots and in a move that pre-dated Paul Newman’s popular line of celebrity foods, launched his Carroll Shelby’s Original Texas Brand Chili Preparation mix in 1976.

After receiving a transplanted heart in 1990, Shelby founded the Carroll Shelby Heart Fund, a charity to help children get heart transplants. He called the foundation his most important work.

Author A.J. Baime spent significant time with Shelby researching his book on the Shelby Le Mans races, “Go Like Hell.” “He contributed so much to so many — his cars, his charity, his victories against all odds,” Baime remembered. “I feel lucky to have known him. In the cars that bear his name and in the lore of the greatest motorsport victories in the history of the USA, he will live on forever.”

On May 10, 2012, 89 years after his birth in 1923, Shelby’s second heart finally stopped.

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