During Car Week in Monterey, the exuberance of the auctioneers' performances nearly matches the bark fests by the California sea lions out at Fisherman's Wharf. It's one way you can reflect on your location in space and time, whether you're the kind of person who can get excited about an elegant '31 Chrysler Imperial CG roadster (above) or a first-year Maserati Ghibli (below). We checked out the offerings at Mecum early on Thursday, as bidding was in process, and later at RM Sotheby's on Friday night, and mostly have comments on value (engineering, esthetic, historic) as it's easy to get distracted by the auction focus on price alone.
Maserati's Ghibli was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro for Ghia in 1966, a productive year which also saw his groundbreaking design for the De Tomaso Mangusta. Both cars went into production in '67, and were harbingers of the trend toward wedge profiles and creased flanks. The engineering was fairly conservative, compared to supercar competitors like Lamborghini's transverse mid-engined V12 Miura and Ferrari's transaxle 275 GTB4. By contrast, the Ghibli offered a 4.7 liter, 4-cam V8 and a live rear axle. This early production car has a trunk lid that opens just above the bumper, giving a false impression of a low load height, but the actual opening ends at the trailing edge of the deck, as with later cars with simple flat lids. This car was fitted with a 4.9 liter engine during restoration; these became a factory option in 1970.
This 1936 Packard 120 Convertible Sedan is unusual not only for its condition, but because de luxe body styles like the convertible sedan were more common on the bigger 160 and 180 series. The 120 was the entry-level eight-cylinder Packard; we mention the $50,000 sale price to highlight the fact that bargains often show up at Mecum.
When Albrecht von Goertz designed the 507* for BMW in the mid-Fifties, it was the result of Max Hoffman, their New York distributor, lobbying the company for a stylish roadster he could use to generate showroom traffic. This had worked when he had lobbied Porsche for the Speedster.
The sleek, 3.2 liter V8 powered roadster stunned show crowds when it appeared in 1956, but production complexity and costs limited Series 1 production to 34 units in that year and in early '57. The Series II was designed with detail changes including a relocated fuel tank, and production continued through 1959. Only 252 examples were built, and BMW lost money on each car. This '59 Series II was number 242, and negotiations are still going on at this writing, against a background of a $1,500,000 reserve.
This car pointed out that stories of failure (like BMW's 507) are often as intriguing to historians (and apparently, buyers) as stories of success (like Ford's GT40). It's one of three Scarab* Formula1 cars built by Lance Reventlow's LA outfit after his success with three Chevrolet-powered Scarabs in SCCA road racing. For their 1960 design, the Scarab team stayed with the front-engined Indy roadster format, with DOHC engine design by Leo Goossen, who had designed similar inline fours for Offenhauser and Meyer-Drake. Unlike on those engines, and under the influence of the '54 Mercedes W196, Goossen added desmodromic valves, mechanically opened and closed. The car was ready for the last year of the 2.5 liter Formula, after Jack Brabham had won the F1 Championship convincingly in '59 with a mid-engined Cooper...
Those engines were the weak point of the Scarab F1 effort, as the team faced trouble including fuel as well as oil starvation, bearing failure, and valve failure. It is thus amazing that this car has an intact desmodromic-valve Scarab engine. Despite the cautionary tale of Scarab's Formula 1 woes, the car sold without difficulty. One wonders if the new owner plans to race it in vintage events...
This '51 Ferrari 212 Inter was one of four 4-passenger coupes built with alloy coachwork by Ghia. Unlike with their bodies for the 2-seat coupes raced by Ernie McAfee in the Carrera Panamericana, Ghia seemed to have trouble with the proportions of the 4-seat format, though the car is cleanly detailed...
The body's bulk seems to overwhelm the Inter chassis, with the wheels far inset from its flanks. With a $400,000 offer, the car remains unsold against a stated $525,000 reserve and $600k to $800k estimate. Wait a minute, you might ask, doesn't revealing a reserve undermine its function as a reserve? A good question, in the view of this writer, who has only sold one car in an online auction, and is thus not an expert on auction procedures.
Amazingly, this 1969 Lamborghini Miura S has appeared on this blog on three previous occasions, and we encountered it at the Concorso Italiano in 2018. It's kind of noticeable in that color scheme, which is a thumb in the eye of the current vogue for military gray sports cars, often in matte finish, which makes them look like full-scale plastic replicas of themselves...
Not the case here. The effect of lime yellow (someone called it green) over blue is like something straight out of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color. The rest of it is "standard" Miura S, with transverse 3.9 liter 4-cam V12, with the engine sharing oil with the 5-speed transaxle because engineer Dallara's project was inspired by the BMC Mini (a story^ told elsewhere in this blog). The last 98 SV versions got rid of the troublesome shared oil feature, and many Miuras have this "baffle" mod. No mention of it in the Mecum summary, though, and negotiations are still going on regarding sale...
Porsches outnumber pickups and Toyotas at so many Car Week venues that one experienced auction visitor commented gleefully on this Just Another Porsche syndrome. This car, however, is anything but just another Porsche. It's a Type 718, or RSK, which first appeared in mid-1957 as a replacement for the 550A/1500RS, using the same tubular chassis design with a more aerodynamic, lower profile body. The flat four engine was the same 4-cam design with roller-bearing crankshaft, mid-mounted as on the 550 and sending power to the rear wheels through a 5-speed transaxle.
This '59 example, though, is one of a half dozen central (single) seat RSKs built (our of a total of 34 cars); the central seat series began with a car built for driver Jean Behra to compete in Formula 2. Porsche fans may be reminded by this Formula 2 special of Porsche's only Formula 1 victory. That was scored in 1962 with a 1.5 liter car, but Dan Gurney's French GP ride was powered by a 1.5 liter flat eight. Someone was impressed with the historicity of this car, but not enough to fork over $3 million, so discussions are ongoing...
There were Cobras aplenty; here a 427 and a 289 once owned by actor Steve McQueen flank a rare, lightweight Ford GT40...
Part of what one observer noted as a numbing surplus of Mercedes 300SLs heads a lineup of Detroit iron, or fiberglass, in the case of the '63 Stingray coupe.
Only 99 copies of Ferrari's 330GTS were built from 1966-'68, compared with nearly 600 of the GTC coupe version; both cars featured 5-speed transaxles like the red 275 GTB4 adjacent. If the latter car has the SOHC V12 engine claimed in the catalog, it's somehow gotten the wrong power plant, maybe during restoration. The "4" in GTB4 refers to the 3.3 liter, 4-cam engine that replaced the SOHC V12 in the first 275GTB; that '67 date is a clue, as GTB4 production started in 1966.
This Ford GT40 lightweight from 1969 is a machine that you're even less likely to encounter at your local cars & coffee. One of 10 lightweights, if you don't count one or two GT40 roadsters built with an aluminum honeycomb chassis (most GT40s had steel honeycombs), this one features lighter aluminum in the roof section, and still has its original engine and chassis. Unlike the later Mk. IV, which was an all-American effort, chassis and bodies for the GT40 Marks I through III were built at Ford Advanced Vehicles in Slough, England.
The GT40 story highlights different views of efficiency that prevailed at Ford and Porsche. In 1969, the model year of this car, Ford won the Le Mans 24 hours with the exact same car that they'd used in 1968. Ford was second to Porsche in the FIA International Championship for Makes in 1969, when Porsche used over 4 dozen cars (selling most off after rebuilding) to secure the title. The previous year, Ford had won the FIA Championship using only 4 cars. While it's true that Porsche amortized some of its high racing costs by selling off rebuilt cars, it seems that team manager John Wyer ran a tighter ship at Ford. Today, however, someone at Ford may be regretting the decision not to hold on to this historic car. It sold at auction for $7,865,000.
This 1936 Delahaye* Type 135 Competition Court (for short chassis) was, like the GT40, a sort of homologation special, based on the firm's 3.5 liter OHV inline six. The short chassis was never listed in Delahaye's factory literature (mais non; she was encore plus confidentielle), but just over 2 dozen were built to qualify for road races that included Le Mans, where Delahaye won in 1938, with two other Delahayes coming in 2nd and 4th. Six of the short-chassis cars were bodied in this teardrop style by Figoni* and Falaschi in 1936; eleven torpedo roadsters were also built to Joseph Figoni's design.
All Figoni's designs included teardrop fenders with skirted rear wheels (and front wheels as well on the torpedo roadsters), while the coupe's graceful fastback with central fin underlined the streamlined theme and distracted from the somewhat stubby proportions. Right hand drive was common on upper crust French cars into the Fifties; the lever left of the wheel is the control offering 4 speeds for the Cotal electromagnetic preselector shift. A floor-mounted lever allows selection of forward, neutral and reverse. The Type 135 thus has 4 speeds forward, and 4 in reverse...
We could go on about the importance of Figoni's teardrop designs in the genesis of Jaguar's XK120 coupe (and have, in other posts), especially the sleeker Talbot-Lagos with their concealed headlights and oval side windows, but thought this car was pretty convincing as an artifact of a lost era. With rarity and Delahaye's racing history behind it, this Figoni teardrop looked like a safe bet to attract interest, and it did. Negotiations are still going on regarding the price, though.
I decided to leave the mobile phone at the hotel when wandering off to RM Sotheby's auction on Friday night with a car enthusiast friend, so I could be unencumbered doing something people once called "having an experience". Thus I missed taking shots of the 1940 Packard Custom Super Eight 180 Darrin above, one of 9 survivors Sotheby's claims of eleven built. This bracingly clean Darrin* design (low-slung for 1940, no trace of running boards) was, considering its rarity, as much of deal as the $50k 120 4-door convertible at Mecum. The car sold for $240,800 while we watched, a pile of money, but less than the $275k-$325k auction house guesstimate. The spectacular Ghia-bodied Fiat 8V Supersonic below from 1953, however, didn't sell, despite a similar car selling last year at RM for a sum that would buy all 9 surviving Packard 180 Darrin Convertible Sedans. So the present owner gets to spend some more time with this Fifties Futurist creation, one of 14 Fiats with this body style, which Ghia also applied to an Aston Martin, a Jaguar, and a Conrero Alfa. The 2 liter 70-degree Fiat V8 (Fiat called it 8V because they thought Ford owned rights to "V8") is known as an engine with design flaws leading to fragility, but the Supersonic is a work of art. A 25% decline of what the Wall Street Journal considers top-shelf classics is only seen by some as a crisis in an increasingly financialized economy, where private equity firms buy up troves of housing units, and we see investment funds devoted solely to the cars WSJ might recommend. Our post-auction walk to the Sandbar & Grill, at Municipal Wharf 2, was interrupted by a delightful interlude watching a colony of sea lions bark at each other, and maybe at us. What, I wondered, would these wild creatures tell us about their world, if they could? After 3 days of almost nothing but cars, it seemed like something worth considering...
*Footnote:
The following posts contain more material on some of the cars featured at these auctions; titles and dates are in parentheses:
BMW 507 ("That Other Five Series", Oct. 20, 2019)
Scarab ("Timing is Everything", June 2, 2017)
Lamborghini Miura ("Mini Cooper's 2nd Cousin, Twice Removed", July 11, 2017)
Delahaye ("Golden Days of Delahayes", June 30, 2018)
Figoni & Falaschi ("The French Line Part 5", June 7, 2020)
Darrin's Packard Designs ("Hollywood Stars", Aug. 4, 2020)
Photo Credits:
All photos of the Mecum offerings, including the bad shots, are by the author. The RM Sotheby's car photos (Packard 180 Darrin Convertible Sedan & Fiat 8V Supersonic) are from RM Sotheby's.
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