Before the project could be seen through, however, Mercedes announced a planned withdrawal from competitive motorsport at the end of 1955, in the works even before Le Mans. The hybrid program was abandoned, leaving Uhlenhaut to appropriate one of the leftover mules as a company car with only a large suitcase-sized muffler added to dampen its near-unsilenced exhaust pipes. With a maximum speed approaching 290 km/h (180 mph), the 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé easily earned the reputation of being the era's fastest road car. A story circulates that, running late for a meeting, Uhlenhaut roared up the autobahn from Munich to Stuttgart in just over an hour, a journey that today takes two-and-a-half hours. US auto enthusiast magazine Motor Trend road tested the car, as did two English journalists from Automobile Revue, who spent more than behind its wheel. After a high-speed session at four o'clock in the morning on an empty section of autobahn outside Munich the latter wrote: "We are driving a car which barely takes a second to overtake the rest of the traffic and for which 120 mph on a quiet motorway is little more than walking pace. With its unflappable handling through corners, it treats the laws of centrifugal force with apparent disdain." Their only regret was that "we will never be able to buy [the car], which the average driver would never buy anyway.". One Uhlenhaut Coupé has been preserved by Mercedes-Benz and is displayed at its corporate museum in Bad Cannstatt. Its only sibling was sold from the museum in May 2022 to a private collector for €141 million euros or ₤138 million pounds or $142 million dollars with the proceeds used to establish the Mercedes-Benz Fund. The price was the highest ever paid for a car, either at private sale or public auction. It also surpassed the Ferrari 250 GTO at $75 Million (EUR 69 Million) the most expensive car ever sold before the Mercedes. Technical description Design The 300 SLR was front mid-engined, with its long longitudinally-mounted engine placed just behind the front axle to better balance front/rear weight distribution. A brazed steel tube spaceframe chassis carried ultra-light Elektron magnesium-alloy bodywork (having a relative density of 1.8, less than a quarter of iron's 7.8), which contributed substantially to the low vehicle mass of for the roadster, in the case of the coupé. The SLR had a second seat for a co-driver,