Mille Miglia
Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR
by Luciano Vittori
Before a Tuscan village, where the road threads between the houses, stands the silver racer that seals the history of this series: a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. Of all the works in this series, it is the true icon of the Mille Miglia.
- TechniqueHahnemühle · Dibond
- Size100 × 75 cm
- EditionEdition of 24
- Price€995
The greatest drive ever
On 1 May 1955 the British driver Stirling Moss, together with journalist and navigator Denis Jenkinson, ran the Mille Miglia in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR carrying number 722 — the time of their departure from Brescia. Over more than a thousand miles of public road, across Italy and back, they held an average speed of nearly 157 km/h. Jenkinson called out the corners from a long paper roll of notes, an early form of the modern pace-note. They won by a margin of over half an hour — a record that would never be broken, for it was the second-to-last Mille Miglia to be run as a speed race.
The 300 SLR was a true Silver Arrow, in the tradition of the Mercedes racers that dominated the European circuits in the 1930s. Beneath the unpainted aluminium — to which the nickname *Silberpfeil* owes its gleam — lay a 3.0-litre straight-eight derived from the Formula 1 car of that same year. It was among the fastest and most refined racing cars of its time.
Luciano Vittori brings the silver car to rest before a village it once passed at full speed. The fresco treatment lays the patina of seventy years over the aluminium — the cheering has fallen silent, the clouds of dust have settled, but the greatest drive in the history of the Mille Miglia lives on in the weathered surface.
