Just sayin’…

Having said this, I do not get the dust pattern, where is the dust on the shelves?

While I can understand the skeptics who look at the photo and attempt to discredit the find, the fact remains that a very rare car has been found. The reports also state that this car is complete and restoration can be done without replacement parts, which in the restoration business is itself a rarity.

Clearly the car was stored poorly but given the OCD nature of the man who owned it, this is not surprising. The car was sitting in the garage for almost 50 years so yeah the tires were probably reinflated and with as many people who surely inspected it I would expect the dust pattern to be the way that it is. Whatever, it’s a great find no matter how hokey the story is.

I remember a (Discovery Channel?) program about the “find” of an Auto Union racer that turned out to not be the “serial number” represented – which dropped its value considerably, and embarrassed the auction house as well.

Of course there’s the question of how well the car will sell in the current economic climate, but the interesting thing is that the people who can spend this kind of money are far less impacted by what has happened to the market than are the people who might bid on a $200,000 matching-numbers musclecar or a half-million-dollar Ferrari. They also typically have _real_ money–factories, oil fields, conclomerates, companies–rather than the imaginary wealth amusingly called “investments.”

There’s a 57SC–not “just” an S–selling in Phoenix in a couple of weeks, if you miss out on this one, though the supercharger that makes it an SC was added relatively recently, obviously not by Bugatti. By Harrah, in fact.

I believe the missing two 57s were crashed.

And now, the question is if 17 where built and 15 are accounted for, then where are the other two missing Bugattis? How long before those two are found?

I don’t know, but I remember reading somewhere that Ettore buried some cars before leaving the factory. Pull out your metal detector and start combing the French countryside…

Bahaha. Yes, the Bugatti sign, and the undusted white cloth and objects with no footprints to the storage shelves. Legit Bugatti – what a fabulous story, but maybe photo-op set up.

Was white powder poured over and around the car? Is the tire mark in the foreground from the car that is usually parked there? The likely auction price, a wild speculation. Good when TTAC takes a second look.

no_slushbox: “…there are a lot of people holding on to old treasures in secret garages instead of putting them to the market.”

One of the more (in)famous examples being the sole remaining 1968 Mustang from the movie Bullitt, supposedly rusting away in some barn while the owner obstinately refuses to take any sort of action to preserve (or at least document) one of the most famous movie vehicles in existance.

As Ronnie Schreiber and porschespeed have alluded to, this is not very likely to be the last great barn find, there are a lot of people holding on to old treasures in secret garages instead of putting them to the market.

It’s nice to know that there are old classics still in hiding, but it’s kind of sad that they are just gathering dust instead of being driven hard and put away wet.

@Stephan Wilkinson. $11M Ferrari linked above.

And now, the question is if 17 where built and 15 are accounted for, then where are the other two missing Bugattis? How long before those two are found?

The price is likely to be a lot less.

Here is a report of an auction of a 1938 Bugatti Type 57 Atalante Coupe in 2006:

This car was offered for sale at the 2006 Gooding & Company Auction held in Pebble Beach, Ca. … This car has had a 100-point restoration in 2005. … At auction, the car was sold for $682,000.

Not only that but most of the things in this world are worth (in terms of a market price) half of what they were worth a year ago. Do you want to bet that Chris Evans couldn’t get anything near the $11M he paid for the ex-James Coburn 1961 Ferrari California Spyder last spring? I’ll take the under.

More about the Bug:

Article with more details and pictures about the Type 57S Bugatti

Auction house web page with pictures

Web page about Type 57S

Wikipedia article

And yes, RF your being a bit cynical, I’m sure the family knew it was there but didn’t know the value, so I think it still counts as a Barn find.

In the summer of 1970 I was working my way thru college putting on roofing and siding. My buddy and I were putting a roof on a house owned by an eccentric old lady (probably my age today…). She had a contemporary car, the third car she owned, in the driveway in front of a two car garage that had newspaper covering all the windows. We stored stuff in the garage and saw her first two cars, a gorgeous pre-war Buick convertible and a ‘54 Ford sedan. Each had about 30000 miles on the odo when she decided that was enough and parked them. She was very concerned that we not leave any holes in the roof for the squirrels to get in – she was, in her own words, squirrel crazy. As you might imagine, we had a lot of trouble keeping straight faces when she told us that….

I thought the same thing as you when I read the BBC article last night. The quote order totally misconstrued the article. Oh well! Who knows what the original context might have been like???

That having been said, the only thing that I would care about is the authenticity of the car itself.

The photo is just an attempt to separate a fool from some extra money.

Given the current economy the buyer will likely be someone who is very wealthy, but not fooled for a second by a picture of this ilk.

As to who knew it was there, just because you know, doesn’t mean you’re going to tell.

I personally know of a very old gent who lives in a very ‘marginal’ neighborhood. His driveout basement garage contains a supercharged Cord, a Dusenberg, and a few other “trinkets”. A couple of my automotive friends have just been driving by and seen him outside washing the things, the same way I learned of him. None of us would ever float his exact location out to the wider world. That would just be beyond wrong. He will die owning those beautiful cars. I would never want to be the one who had the hustlers of the rarified collector world incessantly endeavoring to get him to part with one of his babies.

The person who owned it was an OCD hoarder with no children. His nieces and nephews have been going through his belongings discarding the junk and saving what was valuable. There was a vintage Aston Martin that they’ve already sold and an E Type Jag that was too far gone to restore. There was also the original bill of sale from Ettore Bugatti (which you can see at the Bonham’s site). Anyone who knows an OCD hoarder knows that this is an entirely plausible story. I’ve tried cleaning my mother’s house and come across bags full of thirty year old junk mail as well as new-in-the-box toys that are worth hundreds of dollars. Hoarders often lose track of what they own and have little concept of true value. My mom has stuff she thinks is valuable but is really junk as well as things that she thinks are commonplace, like real glass seltzer siphon bottles, that are actually collectible. Hoarders save everything. It’s an anxiety disorder so rather than deal with the anxiety of possibly discarding something of value, they avoid that anxiety by not throwing anything out. It’s rather sad, but it also makes cleaning up their homes a daunting task. Because there are things of genuine worth, and because they tend to squirrel things away (it’s interesting that “squirrel” and “ferret” have opposite connotations – I suppose that’s the difference between rodents and weasels), you have to go through everything with a fine tooth comb. My mom bemoans that, or so she believes, her grandsons threw away a box full of jewelry when cleaning up after a flood. She had the jewelry stashed in a box of papers and thinks it’s perfectly normal to hide jewelry in trash.

I suppose one can quibble if it’s a true barn find or not, but the fact that the head of Bonham’s motoring dept knew about it is no big deal. In the art world there are many valuable paintings whose provenance and ownership in private collections are known by experts but do not, if ever, surface at an auction. To the family it was a barn find. They had no idea it was there or what value it had.

A few years ago Car and Driver ran an article about an unnamed American car collector who found one of Hitler’s armored Mercedes 540Ks, disassembled and buried in a few barns in the former USSR. Frankly I thought that recovering it and restoring it was akin to the folks who sell Jeffrey Dahmer artifacts, but the car was known to have been built and was found in a barn, so it’s a barn find.

We should all only be so lucky to find an $8 million dollar car in a crazy relative’s garage.

You can find a link to the description and provenance here:
http://www.motorobilia.com/2009/01/ultimate-barn-find-most-valuable-car.html

As for the idea that it’s some kind of fake or reproduction, most reputable auction houses try hard to avoid that kind of scandal.