How a piece of Silberpfeil ended up on PreWarCar.com

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It’s not every day that an ad for a dented and corroded lump of metal makes our minds run away. It did, however, happen last week when this particular ad was placed here on PreWarCar.com. The heading? "Original Mercedes-Benz W25 radiator nose". In case we need to jog your memory, the W25 was that most impressive of racing cars, designed under the command of the Third Reich, who had total domination on the racing track in mind.

Mercedes-Benz W25

Does one of these original cars even survive? In the late 1990s or early 2000s, we remember going to Crosswaite & Gardiner in the in the UK, where we saw a replica being built. But this magnesium bit here is supposedly the real deal, or at least a small part of it. Information in the ad, however, was somewhat limited: “For sale comes here a very exclusive part of the great prewar compressor era of Germany’s Silver Arrows. A sculpture of the period of epic race cars and real heroes.” And so we asked the seller for a little more background.

“There is no doubt that this is original,” we swiftly received in a reply.

"But how on earth did it end up with you?" was asked.

The answer came again as promptly as before: “A friend bought something from an old vehicle collector and the nose section was included in the price. The collector said that his father bought it from a scrap dealer in Karlsruhe in Baden-Württemberg. The entire car was there in the late 1940s. It was just that the nose section was easy to keep, and so it had been hanging on the wall there for decades.”

Well, that’s quite something isn’t it? Baden-Württemberg is close to where Mercedes-Benz is based and we’ve heard stranger stories of Silberpfeil cars ending up in scrapyards much further away. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of and we think some researchers would give an arm for additional information about this. What a great piece of automotive history!

Words by Jeroen Booij. Pictures Helfried P. Daume/Daimler- Benz Media.

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