Sicily, where the Mediterranean sea meets with pure enjoyment of sun light. A great place to spend your holiday and experience Italian food. You will be forgetting daily stresses and refresh yourself.
However, Sicily is not a place to eat and swim! Sicily is the place for racing :) From 1927 to 1957, Sicily held Mille Miglia open road racing. What is Mille Miglia? It means thousands miles racing through the road Sicily. This is not a ordinary race with safety cars and thousands of cameras catching every single point. This race was drawing the between best and worst. Drivers, cars, team everyone was under heavy stress to finish this impossible race in public roads. As they push harder with drum brakes cars, they came closer to see their life like a movie! As you can expect, the cars racing at those years did not have sophisticated safety technologies like now. Actually, racing in Mille Miglia was racing with yourself!
In 1955, Stirling Moss and Dennis Jenkinson with Mercedes 300SLR finished this 1597 km dangerous race in just 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds and average of 157 kilometres per hour. Basically, they achieved a record which cannot be achieved now, I think so! in 1955, driving at the average of 157 km/h is totally unbelievable. There was not ABS, traction control, carbon fibre or anything else; they had only their senses.
Hopefully; before the contemporary SLR’s production stops, Mercedes McLaren produced SLR Stirling Moss Limited Edition. Unfortunately, senseless SLS AMG’s PR campaigns shadowed the only SLR worth to buy!
This car is a combination of past and the future. In every single detail, you can see bits from the original 300 SLR and modern racing technology. This kind of integration between past and present cannot be achieved very easily. It could end up either too present or too past. But this did not happen with this SLR.
Probably in future, this SLR will be one people be paying huge amount money during the auctions. Sorry but the normal SLR will stay normal. And if you ever visit Sicily, don’t forget remember the Mille Miglia.
Pictures are taken from;
Mercedes, Autospies, Wikipedia Websites
