Mercedes-Benz – 710 SS (1929)

If you want to truly understand this impressive Mercedes-Benz 710 SS, you have to go right back to 1929. At that time, it left the factory in April as a tourer only to start its real life a little later with a racing sports body – as a campaigner in a string of races. Max von Arco-Zinneberg was at the wheel of this fiendishly expensive but resoundingly successful car powered by its positively brutal 7.1 litre six-cylinder engine. He was just 21 years old and is reputed to have penned this one-off body himself and ordered it on the basis of the drawing.

As a wealthy privateer driver, the aristocrat won a number of races with his 710 SS, for example on the Gaisberg and Semmering hillclimb races. He already passed the car on to the Prince of Leiningen in 1930 and just two years later it was being driven by Rittmeister von Mosch, before being exported to the United States and finding its new home as part of a collection in Long Island. Not until 2013 did the 710 SS return to Germany. Its ambitious and comprehensive restoration took almost ten years and this was only just completed shortly before the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este.