Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Roadster

The FIA had a rule: to race in GT1, you had to sell the car to the public. Most manufacturers treated this as a formality. Mercedes-Benz treated it as a licence. AMG designed the CLK GTR as a racing car first and worried about the road version afterwards, building it around a carbon fibre monocoque with a V12 mounted behind the driver. Furthermore, the racing programme worked exactly as intended, dominating the FIA GT Championship across two seasons. Moreover, the road cars that followed were never really road cars at all. Just twenty Coupés and six Roadsters left Affalterbach, and at launch the CLK GTR held the Guinness World Record as the most expensive production car ever sold. It remains the most extreme interpretation of homologation the sport has ever seen.

The Roadster is the rarest form the CLK GTR ever took. Six were built, and each one removes the only thing separating the driver from a mid-mounted V12 running at full volume. Furthermore, this example is finished in black over a black interior, a specification that suits the car's proportions in a way silver never quite manages. The dark paintwork lets the aerodynamic surfaces read as sculpture rather than spectacle. As a result, this is a CLK GTR that draws attention on its own terms.