In the summer of 1955 the world watched a race car fly apart in front of a packed grandstand at Le Mans. It was not a small thing. It was not the kind of crash you walk away from or talk about with your hands. Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes launched off the back of an Austin Healey and disintegrated into the crowd. Bodies. Fire. Silence. The kind of silence that only happens when tens of thousands of people understand at the same time that something terrible has just happened.
Up in the Mercedes pit, Alfred Neubauer made the only call a man with a conscience could make. He ordered the rest of the Silver Arrows withdrawn from the race. Just pull them. Get out. There is a point where winning stops being the point and they hit it that day.
A few months later the board in Stuttgart shuttered the racing program. The company line went out. Mercedes Benz was finished with motorsport. Done. The Silver Arrow era ended the same day it lit up the sky over the Mulsanne.
This is the version you know. The version that shows up in the documentaries and the auction catalogs and the coffee table books. The neat ending. The tragic curtain drop. It is tidy and easy to repeat and it has been accepted for nearly seventy years.
It is also not true.
The world that woke up in 1956 was busy becoming something else. Europe was rebuilding itself brick by brick. The autobahn network was still interrupted by war scars. The French Route Nationale system was clogged with trucks and buses and whatever passed for traffic then. Race tracks were getting safer by inches. Aerodynamics was becoming a science instead of a hunch. Ferrari was loud and beautiful and vicious. Jaguar was trying to locate its confidence. Porsche was beginning to understand what lightweight really meant.
The Mercedes 300SL sat in this landscape like a museum piece the public could buy. Most people saw the Gullwing as the glamorous civilian sequel to the W194 that had won Le Mans and the Carrera Panamericana in 1952. Steel doors. Leather. Chrome. Something polite and expensive. A trophy handed to the road going world after the factory closed its racing doors.
But the car was still built on the bones of the W194. The 300SL existed because Nallinger and Uhlenhaut and Neubauer had not forgotten a single lesson from the early fifties. The space frame was still a miracle. The engine still made a mockery of everything else in its class. Privateers begged for lighter bodies and hotter engines so Mercedes built the NSL package. Even the "civilian" Gullwing was only pretending to be civilized.
The accepted story says Mercedes walked away from racing and turned out the lights. The paperwork in Stuttgart says something very different.
In early 1956 Dr Fritz Nallinger signed off on a quiet project inside the walls at Untertürkheim. Four steel bodied W198 Gullwings were pulled off normal production and marched straight into the Sportabteilung. They were stripped. Reinforced. Modified. Given purpose built race prototype “P” engines from Mercedes very own racing department. Tested. Signed off by the same men who built the W196 R and the 300SLR. They were entered in rounds of the 1956 Sports Car Championship under factory direction.
Not customer cars. Not gentleman racer toys. These were among the last machines built by the original Silver Arrow racing department.
Two were destroyed. One was rebuilt after a hard life in competition. Only one survived exactly as it ran in 1956.
This is where the story truly begins.
The factory called it chassis number 5500640. The first of the four. The one they prepared for the Mille Miglia before choosing not to enter it. The one they sent onto public roads with mechanics Weinhardt and Pfeifle at the wheel and then had to peel off the tarmac after it crashed on the way to the Nürburgring. The accident tore into the body and rattled the car hard enough that the factory tore it down to the frame and rebuilt it piece by piece. That is how seriously they took these machines. They were not playing dress up. They were building real race cars under a thin layer of silence.
Once repaired the car was pointed toward the Coppa Inter Europa at Monza and placed in the hands of Armando Zampiero. He was Italian, quick, confident, and motivated by something larger than the paycheck. He hunted down a Ferrari 250 Zagato and passed it on the final lap to take the win. A Gullwing the world assumed was a customer car beat a Ferrari in front of an Italian crowd. That alone should have been enough to drag these cars out of the footnotes, but history sometimes sleeps through the important parts.
The victory set up the car’s next assignment but the assignment itself is what makes the story tilt. Georges Houel was not just some French privateer looking for a fast car. He wanted Stirling Moss in the driver seat from the start. That was the dream. Houel knew Moss was the sharpest blade Europe had ever seen.
Mercedes did not pick Moss. Houel did. What Mercedes did was agree. And the agreement mattered. A factory prepared race car that officially was not supposed to exist outside internal paperwork was not supposed to leave Stuttgart at all, let alone be sold to a privateer. Mercedes had publicly walked away from racing, so anything they built after 1955 was assumed by the outside world to be a customer car or a modified road car. That misunderstanding is the entire reason people still believe Mercedes stopped competing. They did not stop. They just stopped talking.
Mercedes agreeing to sell a secret factory built race car to a privateer was surprising. Agreeing to sell it on the condition that Moss drove it was something else. A handshake that said this car was still theirs in spirit and that Moss was still one of them even after the Silver Arrows went dark.
Houel did something no one would even dream of, or be allowed to do, in modern times. He picked up the car in Stuttgart and simply drove it out of Germany like it was a company pool car. Stuttgart to Paris. No chase truck. No support crew. No crew to make sure the 'gram took note. No enclosed trailer with sponsor logos. Just a man in a brand new factory race car crossing borders on public roads. And the photographs prove it happened. Houel parked near the Arc de Triomphe looking like he had stolen a rocket ship.
Then he drove the car all the way to Nice. To deliver it by hand. To Stirling Moss. Imagine that. The greatest driver on earth standing in the Mediterranean sun waiting for a man to arrive in a machine that technically should not exist.
Mont Ventoux came first. A long violent jaunt that treats engines and chassis like consumables. Moss pushed the car to third overall and set the tone for the week. He won the Comminges circuit race and took the lead of the entire event. He ran third on the Peyresourde climb. Then the ignition began to fail. The car lost seven hundred rpm at Le Mans and surrendered its lead to Alfonso de Portago in a Ferrari. Misfires dragged them backward through Rouen and Reims. Somewhere in the Alps they limped into a small repair shop where a mechanic discovered a loose distributor wire. The kind of thing that would ruin a regular man’s Sunday drive.
You don't end up at a small shop having coffee discovering a faulty distributor wire these days. This kind of thing, in modern racing, would be diagnosed by a pit wall full of engineers before the driver even felt the stumble. There's no story there. Just an ecu thrown whip crack, and back on the circuit you go. In the earlier days of motorsport, you learned something was wrong because the car began to sound like it was arguing with itself. Back then a tiny fault could tilt the entire week. A simple fix, yes, but the kind that drags tension behind it like a trailer and turns the story into something heavier than the part itself.
With the car back to full strength Moss won the St Étienne race. By the time the Tour reached Vichy he and Houel were in second overall trailing de Portago by only three minutes. They arrived at Montlhéry for the final circuit race with the kind of tension that makes men drive a little past sane.
Moss won that race too. He clawed back more than two minutes. After thousands of kilometers he missed the overall win by fifty one seconds. Mercedes covered the cost of the post race overhaul out of respect.
Houel continued racing the car after the Tour. He finished third at Montlhéry. Fifth at the Rallye d'Automne. Fifth at the first Tour de Corse. A string of mechanical failures followed. Gearbox. Brakes. Radiator. Eventually a minor accident. Houel let the car go in 1959. Mercedes France refreshed the interior in red and put it in the Royal Élysées showroom as bait for someone with taste and money.
That someone turned out to be an Air France captain named Alexandre Besnier. He saw the car on the Champs Élysées and bought it. He registered it as 571 LL 77 and drove it across France at speed. His wife refused to drive it because of the attention it attracted. Friends chased him in Ferraris. Gendarmerie motorcycles chased him out of curiosity. He loved the car, but love does not fix a cylinder head. In 1966 he sold it.
The car landed in the hands of Guy Bourbilières who had dreamed of owning a Gullwing since seeing one at the 1954 Paris Salon. He bought 5500640 for six thousand francs and drove it away from the dealership like a man making up for lost time. Mechanical issues returned. The engine came apart. He catalogued every piece and then life caught up with him. The car sat. For almost forty years it sat. Untouched. Preserved by neglect and care in equal measure. A skeleton under blankets. A time capsule with the weight of unfinished work.
When Guy died in 2008 his sons inherited the car and the responsibility. They pulled every part from shelves and boxes and began reassembling their father’s dream. They found the protective belly pan with "1956 Frances Britain Moss" engraved into it. A whisper from the past. By 2011 the car fired back to life. The first drive was taken with their mother in the passenger seat after four decades away.
In 2015 the family sent the car to New York for RM Sotheby’s Driven by Disruption sale. It did not sell. The world did not yet understand what it was.
A new owner acquired it in 2016 and went straight to the source. Mercedes Benz Classic dug into the archives and confirmed everything. The racing department files. The work orders. The signatures from Kling and Neubauer. The originality of the body and chassis and engine. The cutouts in the underbody that matched the factory work orders from 1956. Even the old repairs behind the passenger headlight lined up with the accident notes from the 1957 Andorra Monaco rally. Nothing about the car’s structure lied. Nothing had been smoothed over by restoration. It was exactly what the paperwork said it was.
Classic Sport Leicht in Paris handled the preservation. Not a restoration. A careful return to correctness. The blue interior came back. The original stampings were left visible where they mattered. Factory primer still lived under the skin. The car had been apart, but it had never been erased. In a world full of over restored Gullwings polished into fiction, this one still carried the fingerprints of the men who built it for war.
The car that began as a quiet act of defiance in 1956 now stood as the only untouched survivor of the Sportabteilung program. The only Gullwing raced by Stirling Moss that still wears the bones it wore that year. A car that lived an entire lifetime in the shadows of garages and family memory until the truth finally caught up with it.
History tends to write itself in clean lines. Beginning. Middle. End. The story of 5500640 refuses to cooperate. It is a loose thread that pulls apart an old myth about Mercedes. It is proof that even after the worst night in motorsport the factory did not let the fire go out. They just banked the coals and kept working in the dark.
And now the car stands again. A survivor of a year Mercedes never really talked about. A witness to a chapter most people still do not know existed. The last real Silver Arrow wearing a Gullwing body.
To see some of the archival footage, and images, please check out the full film HERE
