This Cannonball Veteran Mercedes 450SEL 6.9 Is up for Sale on Bring a Trailer
- This Mercedes 450SEL 6.9 is claimed to have finished second in
the 1979 Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. - The car shows 45,000 miles and benefits from a good bit of recent service.
- The auction ends on Sunday, July 2.
For a time, the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 was the fastest sedan in the world. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that one would have ended up running the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. And now, your hard-earned scratch could put an (alleged) little slice of automotive-counterculture history in your garage.
Up for auction on Bring a Trailer—which, like Car and Driver, is a part of the Hearst Autos group—is a 1978 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 with an interesting pedigree. According to the seller, this car allegedly finished second in the final running of the Cannonball in 1979. There’s no paper trail to link it to such an achievement, but according to an account of the final race, a 6.9 did finish in second place, some eight minutes behind the winning Jaguar XJ-S.
Regardless of the veracity of these claims, this isn’t the first time this specific 6.9 has crossed BaT’s virtual auction block. The car was posted in 2017, but the final bid of $26,000 failed to reach the reserve. Given how classic-car prices have reached the ionosphere over the last few years, we wouldn’t be surprised if the current go-around commands an even higher floor.
Despite the 6.9 badge on the back, this 450SEL gets its motive force from a 6.8-liter V-8 that, when new, was good for 250 horsepower and 360 pound-feet of torque—numbers that were sufficient to push the big Benz to 140 mph in its day. Since this vehicle was acquired by its current owner in 2020, the eight-cylinder has picked up new gaskets and cooling-system components, in addition to a new battery and an air conditioning compressor. A three-speed automatic transmission handles the shifting, and it too has been serviced. The 6.9 also came equipped with a hydropneumatic suspension, and again it’s recently been attended to.
The 6.9’s black leather interior looks well maintained, although its factory Becker stereo is now hooked up to aftermarket speakers. Some work has been done in here since 2020 as well, including service on the vacuum-operated door locks and a freshening-up of the wood trim. The post notes that the cruise control doesn’t work, so hopefully your right foot still does.
Senior Editor
Cars are Andrew Krok’s jam, along with boysenberry. After graduating with a degree in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, Andrew cut his teeth writing freelance magazine features, and now he has a decade of full-time review experience under his belt. A Chicagoan by birth, he has been a Detroit resident since 2015. Maybe one day he’ll do something about that half-finished engineering degree.