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 Sale prices of top-end collector cars have risen dramatically over
the last year or so as investors continue to look for hard assets in
which to sink their money, so all eyes will naturally turn to the
Monterey auctions in August expecting to see more multi-million dollar
cars cross the block and more auction records break. Gooding and Company
will thus enter Monterey this year with a car expected to fetch
northward of eight figures: the Von Krieger Mercedes-Benz 540K Special
Roadster.
Described in a Gooding press release as "the most significant
Mercedes-Benz to ever come to auction," the 540K comes with no
pre-auction estimate "due to the car's unprecedented historical
significance and provenance." Yet the auction house believes it will set
marque records, and David Gooding himself told the New York Times Magazine this week that it wouldn't surprise him if it bid as high as the first-ever 1957 Ferrari Testa Rossa that Gooding sold last year for $16.39 million, setting the current record for a car sold at public auction.
One
of 26 540K Special Roadsters built to special order before World War
II, the high-door, long-tail, exposed-spare car, chassis number 130949,
was purchased new in 1936 by the aristocratic Von Krieger family for son
Henning to use, but the Baroness Gisela Josephine Von Krieger - "a dead
ringer for Marlene Dietrich," as the New York Times Magazine described her; "one of the 10 most fashionable women in the world," according to Gooding - eventually made it her own. Stories abound
of how the Baroness removed it from potential destruction in Germany
during World War II, first shipping it to Switzerland in 1942 and then
to the United States after the end of the war. Though she lived in
Manhattan, she kept the 540K at the Homestead Inn in Greenwich, even
after she moved back to Switzerland in the early 1960s.
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