Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance: The Mercedes 540K Special Roadster Bags 2023's Best of Show Title
Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance is a historic car show held every year at the end of the Monterey Car Week with Best of Show title being given to a vintage car. The 2023 winner is the Mercedes 540K Special Roadster.
By Dhruv Paliwal
The 2023 Monterey Car Week has come to a close with the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, held on the Sunday falling on 20th August, rounding off the event and with that, we have our 2023 Best of Show winner – a 1937 Mercedes 540K Special Roadster owned by one Jim Patterson.
Jim, who is a known collector of rare vehicles, bought this car in 2022 in light of how rare it was. In fact, only three of these long tail Special Roadsters exist in the world today. The one that won the Best of Show at the 2023 edition of Pebble Beach is special in its own right as it has only been driven 13,000 miles, has never been separated from its drivetrain and in the greater scheme of things, has never even been restored.
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The Mercedes 540K was first shown at the 1936 Paris Motor Show and at the time, it retailed for 28,000RM. In 2021 that amounted to $2,30,000 but the real cost of the car is much higher today. It features a 5,401cc straight 8 engine that was capable of delivering 113bhp. There was a supercharger too, which could be manually or automatically engaged. For the latter, all you needed to do was prod on the throttle all the way to its limit. With that, the power output got upped to 177bhp. The top speed of the 540K Special Roadster was 170 km/h.
Mercedes offered three different variants of the 540K depending on customer preference, with a couple of them being long wheelbase and one featuring a short wheelbase. The 540K was also available as a two-seater convertible and as a four-seater convertible. The winner of the 2023 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is a two-seater version. In all its iterations, a total of 419 units of the 540K were delivered from the Sindelfingen factory at the time with production ceasing in 1940.
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