Brighten up your day with these rare, Nineties motorsport Mercs

Post bank holiday blues getting you down? Here’s a trio of seasoned Silver Arrows for you to swoon over: a C11 and two CLK GTRs, one in ‘GT1’ race spec and the other in production form. Happy Tuesday.

The reunion happened at the annual FuoriConcorso event, which takes place at a couple of villas overlooking Lake Como. It’s basically a gathering for fancy people to wear fancy clothes and talk about, yep, you guessed it, fancy cars.

No doubt there was plenty of conversation around these three Mercs. The two full-blown racers actually have a serious bit of history between them, what with them being title-winning cars, and having done so with strong performances on Italian soil.

The C11 competed in - and won - the 1990 FIA Group C championship, besting rivals like the Jaguar XJR-11 and the Porsche 962. Equipped with a ferocious 5.0-litre twin-turbo V8, producing around 730bhp in race trim, the C11 snatched a one-two victory in its maiden race (Monza) to set the tone as the car to beat that season.

Seven years later, the GT1 would prove similarly mighty in the 1997 FIA GT Championship, with part of its points haul coming from a second-place finish at Mugello. 20 road-legal homologation cars were derived from it - like the one pictured - and each is now worth an eye watering sum. For perspective, a coupe and soft-top pairing sold for around £15m back in 2023. We’re still salty our offer of a tenner plus a Maltesers packet was declined.

Anyway, we’ve reason to believe this may be the first time a C11 and a GT1 have come together in a public setting. Surely that’s enough to lift those weekend blues?