COMPILED BY CHRIS BIETZK
MERCEDES-BENZ W196 TETHER CAR
Mercedes shortened its W196 racer for the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix, certain that the standard chassis was not ideally suited to the Principality’s tight street circuit. The team wasn’t sure, though, of the optimal weight distribution in the short-chassis W196, so it prepared one car for Stirling Moss with the engine in the usual place, and shifted the straight-eight forward in the car allocated to Juan Manuel Fangio. During practice, Moss tried his teammate’s car and was irritated to realise it was superior, but on race day Fangio’s mount expired at half-distance, leaving Moss to inherit the win – or so it seemed. After 30 more laps, poor old Stirling was engulfed in smoke as his car’s engine blew up without warning. Maybe it’s for the best, then, that this charming vintage tether car, fashioned after Moss’s explosive number 6 Mercedes, has never even been fuelled, let alone run. It was apparently once owned by Henri Chemin, who led the race department of Chrysler France in the early 1970s, and it spent many years in the museum of car collector Adrien Maeght, and both men preserved the scratch-built wooden body, the metal chassis and the little compression-ignition engine in perfect condition.
£15,000. bentleyslondon.com
VINTAGE RENAULTÉTOILE FILANTEPOSTER
It was 70 years ago this year that Joseph Szydlowski, founder of French gas turbine manufacturer Turbomeca, contacted Renault to propose a joint venture. That was the first step of a journey that ended in Bonneville two years later, when the striking Étoile Filante, or ‘Shooting Star’, whistled across the Salt Flats at 191.9mph, setting a Land Speed Record for a gas-turbine-powered car weighing under 1000kg – an achievement celebrated by this period poster.
£972. chicagovintageposters.com
TRIUMPH TIGER 110 T-SHIRT
Seven decades after the Tiger 110 went on sale, that logo, featuring the number 110 disguised as stripes, still delights. There was some debate, of course, about whether the T110 quite lived up to its name – meant to indicate the bike’s top speed.
Triumph apparently wound a T110 up to 117mph during testing, but no matter how they tried, the staff of The Motor Cycle couldn’t exceed a measured 109mph. ‘One-ten’, we suspect, suited Triumph’s sales department better!
