Mercedes CLK GTR Slot Car Review By Clark Howell

Feb. 13 2004 Review

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The Mercedes CLK GTR by Bichler Racing Austria is an excellent and exotic infusion of high tech brought to life in HO scale. The resin cast car is expertly finished, painted, and mounted, ready-to-race on a Tyco 440-X2 chassis. Its drop-dead good looks and awesome racing prowess guarantee to increase the value of your slot collection.

In 1997 Mercedes made an all out effort to win the FIA GT1 series over rivals Porsche and McLaren. Rules of the GT1 series required manufacturers to sell at least one of each entry for road use. While McLaren's F1-GTR and Porsche's 911 super cars were designed first for the street and then converted for racing, the all new Mercedes CLK GTR was designed solely for the track.


	The 1997 CLK GTR dives through the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca on its way to the FIA GT1 Championship


	The requisite "production" version of the car was never intended to be used for daily driving, and Mercedes made no attempt to conceal it. Only 25 of the street legal CLK GTR cars were produced, and these were never tuned for comfortable use on bumpy real-world roads. The GTR has the distinction of being the most expensive road car ever built- and at a price of $1,576,000, Mercedes still lost money on each car sold. How expensive is a CLK GTR? You could buy a new Ferrari 360 Modena every day for a week, and still have money left over for a Lamborghini Diablo, all for the price of one GTR. Put it this way- even Jay Leno doesn't own one of these.


	Bichler cars are a relatively new phenomenon for American slot buyers, although Alexander Bichler has been selling resin-cast HO bodies for the past ten years in his native Austria. Much like American cottage builders MEV and Nu-Rora, the cheekily-acronymed B.R.A. is highly regarded in European slot circles for producing first rate casts of rare or hard to find slot bodies. Bichler has elevated casting to previously unknown levels, and now sports a line of fully detailed cars mounted and assembled on rolling NOS chassis. Part of the current lineup available from Bichler (whose sole licensed American importer is Rad Trax of Nevada) includes the glorious 1998 Mercedes CLK GTR road car, which comes fitted to a long wheelbase Tyco 440-X2 pan chassis. Bichler refreshingly chooses to reproduce the elusive and unobtainable street version of the car, rather than the much more famous racing model commonly seen in 1:24 and 1:32 scales in classic Warsteiner livery. Owners of the B.R.A. slot car will find themselves in a club nearly as exclusive as the owners of the real Mercedes.

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