A fortnightly column. Buyer's guides, market commentary, and provenance stories. Written by the people we work with — collectors, valuers, restorers — and by us.
The R107 SL — built from 1971 to 1989 — is the longest-running Mercedes roadster ever made. Almost 240,000 of them exist. Scarcity, in other words, is not why it commands the prices it does. The R107's value lives in three things: a body that has aged the way Karl Wilfert designed it to age, a V8 that sounds correct, and the kind of provenance that survives on paper.
Read the full dispatch →Market commentary · May 2026
Twelve months ago, a tidy 1985 Carrera 3.2 in Cape Town landed in West Sussex for forty percent less than a comparable UK-market car. The trade was real. This month, with the rand near R23.5 to the pound, the arithmetic has tightened.
Continue reading →Provenance · April 2026
The chassis was correct. The motor was correct. The paint was correct, more or less. What sold the car was a lever-arch file: thirty-eight years of service slips, a 1986 letter from the original supplying dealer in Lausanne, and a hand-written log of every tyre fitted since 1971.
Continue reading →Bureau notes · May 2026
Our brief, on a single page. Five disciplines. Two markets. Pre-1996, always. Patient, never anxious. The cars we will not source, and the reasons.
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