A gold-plated silver arrow. This weekend, the Mercedes F1 car driven by Lewis Hamilton in 2013 was auctioned by RM Sotheby's. The auction house was hoping to make between $10 million and $15 million, but it soared to a whopping $18.815 million. This makes the car the second most expensive Formula 1 car in history, far surpassing Michael Schumacher's Ferrari F2003-GA sold last year for $14 million, but still far behind the 196 Mercedes W1954R, driven by the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio, which sold for nearly $30 million almost a decade ago.
One of the reasons for this exceptional auction is that there are very few Mercedes F1 cars from the Hamilton era on the market, since most of the cars are in the possession of Mercedes, Toto Wolff (the boss of the Mercedes team) or Lewis Hamilton himself. So this was a rare opportunity for a collector to acquire one.
But here's the question we're asking. Considering that this car won only one race in the 2013 season (the Hungarian GP), a year in which Hamilton "only" finished fourth in the championship, it is hard to imagine how much money could be paid for by one of the F1 cars that played a role in one of the Briton's seven world titles.
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