The car is expected to fetch £6 million at auction
Posted on 01/07/2007 5:46:58 PM PST by bruinbirdman
In its day it won two grands prix and reached speeds that would not be surpassed for decades. Now a racer conceived as a symbol of Nazi domination is about to set a new record, as the world's most expensive car.
The car is expected to fetch £6 million at auction
The 15ft 1939 Auto Union D-type is expected to fetch about £6 million when it goes under the hammer at Christie's in Paris, surpassing the record £5.5 million paid for a 1931 Bugatti Royale at the Royal Albert Hall 20 years ago.
Its arrival in the auction room is thanks only to a dogged collector who tracked down two of the fabled cars in Russia, where they had been taken after the war, and a specialist British car restorer in sleepy Sussex.
The car's genesis dates back to the 1930s when Adolf Hitler provided the funds for two companies, Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz, to start producing racing cars that came to be known as Silver Arrows. The revolutionary cars were designed by the Austrian automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche.
The two companies fulfilled the führer's dream of German domination of grand prix racing. Their Silver Arrows won most grands prix races from 1934 onwards and set records that lasted for decades, reaching speeds of more than 186mph in 1937, and more than 250mph during land speed record runs.
Each car had a rear, three-litre engine providing 485 brake horse power. The power of some models was not equalled until the early 1980s and turbo-charged Formula One cars.
In 1937 Hitler awarded Porsche the German National Prize for Art and Science, one of the rarest decorations in the Third Reich. Ferdinand's son, Ferry, went on to develop the legendary Porsche 356.
In 1939, as war clouds gathered over Europe, Tazio Nuvolari, an Italian, drove the D-Type now up for sale to victory in the Yugoslav Grand Prix and Hermann Müller won the French Grand Prix in it.
At the end of the war the Auto Union team's cars, which are believed to have been hidden in a mineshaft in Germany, were found by the Russians who took them back to the Soviet Union so that engineers could study their technology.
Then, in the early 1970s, Paul Karassik, an American classic car collector on a visit to Poland, heard rumours that some of the fabled Auto Union Grand Prix cars were to be found behind the Iron Curtain.
Mr Karassik, who was born in Serbia but went to America and took US citizenship after the war, began a 10-year hunt for the Auto Union and other classic cars.
In 1982 he slipped away from his Intourist guide while on a trip to Russia and met a friend from Russian military school in Serbia, Oleg Tolstoy, great-grandson of the author of War and Peace.
Mr Tolstoy introduced Mr Karassik to Russian car collectors and he eventually tracked down two of the dismantled racers and smuggled them out to Florida, via Helsinki and New York, by hiding them under a false floor of a Mercedes Benz camper. Mr Karassik had the parts, but wanted the cars rebuilt. He was advised to contact Crosthwaite & Gardiner, which is based in the village of Buxted, East Sussex, and has been at the forefront of Bugatti restoration since the early 1980s.
Dick Crosthwaite, a founder-director of the firm, went to Florida and was astonished to find one complete set of Auto Union parts plus a second engine and enough original duplicate parts to rebuild the two cars manufactured originally in 1938 and 1939.
One was sold to Audi. The other car, the winner of the Reims and Belgrade Grand Prix, was bought by Abba Kogan, a Brazilian collector who lives in Monaco.
It is Mr Kogan's car that is being sold.
A spokesman for Christie's in Paris, said: "The 1939 Auto Union could well break the record. It is more important that the Bugatti Royale, which is a fantastic car, but the Auto Union has everything.
"It is the last, fastest and most modern version of that model and the story not just of its grand prix wins in 1939 but the whole history of its rescue and restoration makes it truly unique."
• Auto Union's trademark symbol of four overlapping rings represented its four member companies, Horch, Audi, DKW and Wanderer. The company eventually became Audi, which retained the four-ring emblem.
Fascinating story, thanks.
>>>Aktiengesellschaft
Thank you!
In Germany, the terms Gmbh and AG are much the same as Incorporated, Corporation in the US.
http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://www.notare.bayern.de/content/th_untern/untern_gmbh.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dgmbh%2Bag%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG
I said Audi AG because I think it is the current corporate entity name. In history the best known German car maker which fed into today's Audi was Auto Union. Note the symbol on the race car, too.
Auto Union has a long history--almost the same as Mercedes.
Sie sind willkommen!
AG is a German abbreviation for corporation ( like we would use Inc.).
Learning it meant Publicly Traded was helpful for a book I'm in the middle of reading. Thanks!
Yes. It's a super-secret German code, short for "aktiengesellschaft," which means "publicly traded corporation." Think Inc.
Ping!
If you don't have to worry about cooling a two-stroke engine, the amount of horsepower you can get out of it is almost limitless. At one point as I've heard it Auto Union was working on a pancake 8-cylinder 2-stroke which was producing something like 700 - 800 hp at about 1500 cc but they never found a complete solution to cooling it.
Means the same as Inc.
A spokesman for Christie's in Paris, said: "The 1939 Auto Union could well break the record. It is more important that the Bugatti Royale, which is a fantastic car, but the Auto Union has everything.Insipid salesmanship alone could lead any serious commentator to dare suggest that there exists a greater automobile than the original "Bug," the Bugatti Royale.
Our Christie's spokesman should just go away and forever for it. Sorry, Dorothy, but there's no comparison. The AU was a state-sponsored project; the Royale was a defiantly individualistic project born of individual genius. In technique, design, manufacture, and history there is none other than the Royal Bug.
For God's sake, it was not only the largest car ever built from ground-up, it's cylinders, making some 800+ cu. in., were bored out of a solid cast. The machine was unreal, unimaginable, and entirely unrepeatable.
Every modern racer is another '39 AU. No one could ever recreate a Royale:
I'm pretty sure that Porsche now has the biggest individual stake in VW AG, which owns Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Lambo, and a couple of others. It's not like they bought just a bigger stake in Audi.
Dang... 485 HP out of 3 liters in 1937? Is that correct? That's 160 HP per liter. A Rolls Royce Merlin V-12 supercharged 27 liter aircraft engine only made 50-60 HP per liter.
jw
An Audi racer wouldn't fall out of the sky, if an engine failed. And only had to go several score kilometers between rebuilds.
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