Toto Wolff spotted behind wheel of £8m Mercedes supercar in Monaco

It's probably quite nice to own a third of Mercedes' F1 team, just like Toto Wolff.

Not only are you a billionaire pretty much by default, but you get the inside line on some of the coolest cars to ever exist - if they were made by a certain German manufacturer, at least.

Relatedly, the 54-year-old Wolff has been spotted cruising around the streets of Monaco in a Mercedes CLK GTR - a car so rare that just 28 road-legal versions were ever made: two prototypes, six roadsters, and 20 coupes.

Why so few? Well, they didn't really want to make for public consumption at all, but the rules of the FIA GT Championship at the time said that any cars racing in their series had to have a public production run, and so the 'Straßenversion' (literally Street Version' edition) of the sleek Merc came to be.

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Wolff heads out in 604 horsepower V12 monster

It's not clear if Wolff owns the car, which has proved in the past to be a somewhat impractical machine for him. A video from last year at the Dubai Autodrome showed the Austrian trying to climb into Mohammed Ben Sulayem's CLK GTR, attempting three or four different angles of entry to fold his 6'5 frame into the car, whose roof is less than 4' from the floor.

He did make it in eventually, with some assistance, and got the 6.9-litre AMG V12 engine roaring around the track.

When it rolled off the production line in the late 90s, that engine produced an absurd 604 horsepower and 572 pound-feet of torque, about as close as it's possible to get to a pure racing car which happens to be allowed to be driven on the streets.

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If a driver really wanted to give the six-speed manual transmission a workout, the listed 0-100km/h (or 0-62mph) time was just 3.8 seconds, with a top speed pushing 320km/h (200mph).

Mercedes CLK GTR a true record-breaker

The CLK Straßenversion held the Guinness World Record for the most expensive production car when it first hit the market, going for $1,547,620, and held that record for the best part of two decades until the Ferrari FXX-K hit the metaphorical shelves in 2015.

One of the six Roadster versions of the car sold for $10,235,000 at a 2023 RM Sotheby's auction in Las Vegas – despite the car not even being legal to freely bring and drive in the US, as Mercedes decided not to go to the trouble of complying with US motor-vehicle regulations.

The car will be good to go at some point next year when it reaches 25 years old, but until then, if its owner wants it in the US, it'll have to be under 'show or display' exemptions, which allow rare cars of "historical or technological significance" to be driven on public roads for no more than 2,500 miles (4,000km) a year. Given that the car had just 170km on the clock when it sold, and it's not exactly set up for road trips, that might not have been a problem.

The GT1 racing version of the CLK GTR - and its improved follow-up, the CLK LM - effectively killed the GT1 racing class.

So dominant were those two cars, winning six of 11 races in 1997 and every single race in 1998, that no other team entered the 1999 FIA GT Championship in the GT1 class except the Mercs. As such, the FIA chose to run that year with the GT2 class alone.

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Written by

Chris Deeley - Editor

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