The Mille Miglia, or thousand-mile race through Italy, was a notoriously difficult and prestigious road race, won to this point by Italians piloting Italian machinery.
Rudolf Caracciola broke that mould with his 1931 Mercedes- Benz SSKL privateer entry, as Mercedes-Benz were unable to offer factory resources and backing at that time. Ably assisted by his co-driver, Wilhelm Sebastian, Caracciola won the 1000 mile extravaganza, achieving an average speed of 101.1 kilometres per hour in the race from Brecia to Rome and back.
Caracciola described the Mille Miglia in his autobiography as ‘1,600km on dusty country roads, passing gorges and ravines … around horrible corkscrew bends and snake-like passages; through cities, towns and villages and again along dead-straight roads at an average of 150, 160, 170km … one night and then another day.”*The SSKL (Super-Sport-Kurz-Leicht or super-sport-short-light) was the last version of the six-cylinder compressor sports car from Mercedes-Benz and was built solely as a two-seater racing car. It used a seven-litre six-cylinder engine that produced 300 brake horsepower with its compressor fitted.
This fine 1:8 scale model of the Mercedes-BenzSSKL precisiely replicating the car as raced to victory by Rudolf Caracciola in the Mille Miglia on the 12th and 13th of April 1931, has been handcrafted and finished in our workshops with the co-operation and assistance of Mercedes-Benz regarding original finishes, materials, archive imagery and drawings. The use of supremely accurate digital scanning of the original car has allowed us to perfectly recreate every detail at scale. Furthermore, it has undergone detailed scrutiny by both engineering and design teams to ensure complete accuracy of representation.
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