Racing cars with real racing pedigree frequently bring significant sums of money when they change hands. The car in the images below is a 1982 Mercedes-Benz SL Trans Am racing car purposely built to tear up the track. The car was raced by the DeAtley Motorsports/Michelob race team in its day. The car is hitting the auction with Mecum Auctions in Kissimmee, and the auction ends on the 16th.
The vehicle was previously owned by Neat DeAtley, who owned a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Idaho. In its era, the car was raced by Loren St. Lawrence. It was built for the 1982 racing season and was notable for being the first Mercedes-Benz racing car to take to the track since 1955 in a professional series.
While the car came from the factory with a 5.0-liter V-8 engine under the hood, it was modified to displace 4.5 liters to meet Trans Am specifications. The engine is topped with a pair of Holley carburetors to dump fuel into the cylinders and has tube headers. The transmission is a five-speed manual.
While the car looks very similar to a factory Mercedes-Benz SL from 1982, it wears a fiberglass wide-body and is built on a tube chassis. Like most racing cars, heavy emphasis was placed on aerodynamics, and the car features ground effects to help it stick to the racing track, including front and rear spoilers.
The car rolls on beautiful modular BBS wheels that are shod with Goodyear Eagle racing tires. The car is fitted with a custom full roll cage to keep the driver safe, and it has four-wheel disc brakes. Disc brakes all the way around are common on even the cheapest cars today, but in the early 80s, four-wheel discs weren’t that common.
If you take a close look at the fiberglass wide-body, you can tell that the graphics on the car were hand-painted and lettered. As good as the car looks, it reportedly has the original paint and lettering on the body. Considering contact is frequently made in automotive racing, and Cars are often crashed, for this racing vehicle to have survived with its original paint and graphics since 1982 is impressive.
