The Most Beautiful Silver Arrow?

Cars

The C11 – Mercedes’ 1990 Sports Car stallion might appear to be retro in design terms these days, but we’d more readily call it a classic.

Carbon Fibre hulled and packed with that monstrous twin turbo-ed engine packing over 700 horsepower, this was the car that Michael Schumacher drove when promoted from his drive in F3 – before moving on of course to make F1 history.

The young Schuey was mentored in the C11 by died in the wool racers Jochen Mass and Mauro Baldi – while his current F1 technical director and team principal Ross Brawn was working across the pits for Mercedes’s great rival Jaguar.

Strangely enough Mercedes decided to swerve Le Mans for that year, choosing instead to focus on defending their the Group C sports car championship itself – which in fact they did easily.

In our opinion this was the prettiest of the bunch of that late-period sports cars – F1 would soon come to totally eclipse these sorts of cars in popularity – mainly because of the complex machinations of the FIA – it had the aggressive essence of the Porsche 917 with a hint of the carbon-fibre trickery that changed Motor Racing forever.

This was a real bridge builder between the steel and valves ancien regime and the CG-dominated future…

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