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Unless you buy a new car, you seem to always take some risk as to how a car has been treated, what kind of maintenance it has had and most importantly what kind of service it’s going to give you once you take ownership. Sometimes these risks are small but a lot of times, especially in the case of used German cars, it is a lot of risk if you are spending more than a few thousand dollars. Even with dealer maintained cars, technicians sometimes rush through jobs or lack the attention to detail just to get the car off their rack and move on to else to keep those hours moving. Today’s car has a seller that puts that risk at the very low end of the scale when buying a 26 year-old expensive German car. Enter Kent Bergsma:
Edit 6/13/2017: the ABC Exclusive replica 560 SEC is back on a no reserve auction for a $15,000 starting bid. Click HERE!
Coupe versions of the Mercedes-Benz W126 chassis are popular fodder for these pages, and in particular we love to look at some period modified versions. Just last week Craig looked at a 1989 560SEC with period AMG bits, though that car was not an originally modified car. Today I have a comparison of two different directions modifications took in the 1980s on the C126, and in many ways it is a commentary on both how to properly present a car and…well, how not to. Whether these cars are to your taste is another matter, but we can certainly see the divergence in style pretty quickly. Which one is the winner? Let’s take a look at the European specification AMG model first:
A couple of years ago this video of a murdered-out 560SEC AMG surfaced on Jalopnik and I fell in love. Not only did the car have tremendous, old-school presence, the film showed an owner who wasn’t afraid to smoke the back tires while driving it quickly and aggressively. Hooning the large, pillar-less brute looked like tremendous fun. Unfortunately, authentic AMG cars from the pre-merger period don’t come to market very frequently. And when they do, they are usually priced well beyond the means of mere mortals like myself (you can see examples we’ve featured before here, here and here). A cheaper alternative would be to find a regular SEC that has had some AMG exterior parts installed, like this one.
Mercedes’s C126 coupe first appeared in 1981 and remained in production until 1991. Derived from the W126 platform SE/SEL, the SEC combines the stately grace of the S-class sedan with the sportiness and elegance of a long, pillar-less coupe. These cars still look special today, especially with all the windows down, looking low and mean. The examples that usually catch my eye are either bone stock and completely original, or outrageously modified cars like the AMG wide-bodies which, when they do come to market, are usually priced at a couple of hundred grand. Today’s car, which is mostly stock but has been gently modified with some Euro and Lorinser accessories, represents a nice balance between the two.
There are many legends from the 1980s tuning scene, and probably if you were to single out one single car as the most famous it would be the Ruf CTR “Yellowbird” that stunned magazines with its 200+ m.p.h. top speed and created one of the first internet sensations with its slithering sideways lap of the ‘Ring. But near equal to the yellow 911 is the widebody bad boys from Affalterbach. With their four cam V8s churning supercar power levels and their widened flanks, they were a favorite poster subjects and still draw adoring crowds today. A steady stream of AMGs from Japan have been making their way across the ocean to the U.S., and this one is reported to be one of the original 6 widebody 560SECs made for the Japanese market:
