The greatest

The noise alone makes you want to run and hide. Eight cylinders in a line, valves operated not by passive springs but active ‘Desmodromic’ gear that physically lifts and replaces each valve in its seat. It actually sounds quite like two engines which, with the drive being taken between cylinders four and five, in a way it is.

Looking for the symphonic harmonies of a Ferrari V12, or the sweet smoothness of a Jaguar or Aston straight-six? I’m afraid you got off at the wrong stop: this one is just pure in-your-face, you-talkin’-to-me aggression. I think if I heard one of these coming up behind me on the track I’d leap out the way through fear alone.

The Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. If you ask AI how many were built, your friendly neighbourhood bot will confidently assert there were nine. As if you needed more proof you can’t trust everything you find on the internet, even when aggregated from everything you couldn’t be bothered to look up yourself. Further it will tell you that one of them, chassis 0004/55, was the car in which Stirling Moss won the 1955 Mille Miglia at a record speed that would never be beaten, and in that regard at least, it is entirely correct. It might even just possibly reveal that chassis 0006/55 is the only SLR that no longer exists because it was the car involved in the 1955 Le Mans disaster. And it will certainly point out that chassis 0007/55 and 0008/55 were the two ‘Uhlenhaut’ coupés and tell you these were the cars that were to race in 1956 before the team pulled the plug. But that’s not correct either.