Can a £4million car be called a bargain?

“Unequivocally, this car represents the most undervalued and silently under-appreciated supercar of the modern era,” says Shelby Myers, RM Sotheby’s car specialist. Shelby really doesn’t hold back in putting the car’s case: “I firmly believe the car offered in our Monterey auction represents the ultimate in collector car investment and long-term value collectability.”

And the car he is so enthusiastic for? That’s the Mercedes-Benz AMG CLK GTR, poster car of the 1990s GT1 era and the road-racing nemesis of the McLaren F1.

The RM specialist argues that with only 25 of the road-legal homologation specials made – making it far rarer than the F1 – it “is only a matter of time before the model escalates to near equal market value as the $20 million supercars”.

There’s a strong argument to say that if you are convinced by that and  plan to make garage space available for a CLK GTR, the 1998 example in the auction in California on August 24^th-25^th is the one to do it for. It is the ninth of the 25 made, and is as-new with just 1,500km (930 miles) accrued under its three owners. The car has recently been imported to the US where it has been federalized for 50 states, making it rarer still.

The bargain Benz you’d be buying into is unquestionably a GT1 great with its extreme bodywork and 6.9-litre V12 pumping out 600bhp for 0-100mph in six and a bit seconds and a top speed of 214mph. The racing CLK GTRs battled McLaren and Porsche through the late 1990s, becoming the dominant force in the 1997 and ’98 GT1 Championship seasons. No surprise perhaps when you consider it was built as a racer first and then homologated as a road car – the direct opposite of what McLaren did.

And the guide price for the undervalued German beast? The good news is it’s a quarter the value of a McLaren F1. The bad news is that’s still $4.2-5.2 million (£3.2-4m).

As we said, a bargain!