THE COLOUR OF VICTORY

This Mercedes 2.0-litre Targa Florio was part of the winning works team on the fabled road race in 1924. Now it's back to tackle those same Sicilian mountain roads a century on

- Glen Waddington

It's all in the paint. In 1924, Mercedes won the Targa Florio in a 2.0-litre racer very much like this one. Almost identical, in fact, and finished in red - unusually for a German racing car. The winner no longer exists, but this works team car is one of three that competed, and it finished 11th in the hands of Christian Lautenschlager (the third came 16th, driven by Alfred Neubauer), in the process helping Mercedes to earn the Coppa Florio (for an extra lap, after which they finished first, ninth and 13th) as well as the Coppa Termini, the overall team prize.

This car has belonged to Mercedes-Benz since 1937, when it bought it back for its own collection; you might even have seen it on the 'banking' in the marque's Stuttgart museum, where it had previously been assumed to be the winning car, driven to victory on the winding mountain roads of Sicily by Christian Werner on 24 April 1924. Over the course of 18 months, it has been put through an exhaustive and exacting restoration by Mercedes-Benz Classic. And now here it is, in Sicily once more, to tackle those very same tortuous (and torturous) roads fully 100 years on.