From the first strikes of pencil upon paper, to the final few inches of works driver Bernd Schneider’s initial test lap at Jarama in April 1997, it took just 128 days for the Mercedes-Benz Sportabteilung and its motorsports partners to create their all-conquering CLK GTR, a brand-new racing sports car with immediate championship-winning pedigree.

To the tremendous shock of perhaps everybody in the world outside the company’s specialized race factories in Affalterbach, Stuttgart, and Ossweil—the CLK GTR proved so dominant that it effectively caused the collapse of the motorsport series for which it was designed, and so well engineered that it remains one of the most highly revered racing sport car designs of the modern era.

The CLK GTR, alongside the McLaren F1 and Porsche 911 GT1, forms the vaunted “GT1 Trinity;” rarified, contemporaneous rivals that contested the FIA GT1 class and thus represent the apogee of late-Nineties racing sportscar development.

Of these three legendary mode...