fbekholden.com

..... one of these ...

This is posted up for Dave "Bootlegger"

Pretty special day for my daughter and i. You only get one chance in a lifetime to cruise in a 1937 type 57 bugatti straight eight.

Bloody thing flew. It has had the one owner since the sixties.

My daughter got an extra bonus today when another mate let her play in his sprint car.

I really am ruining her life.

Now that is a seriously nice car

Whaddya talkin 'bout Sam? Needs a roof chop, mags 'n a blown sbc

Seriously, yeah, how often, eh? Beautiful car. Just guessing, but probably worth seven figures. The Type 57S examples go for $4 million upwards

Stygian wrote: The Type 57S examples go for $4 million upwards

I had no idea they were worth that much

Makes my picnic shelf look like a bargain.

FBeing wrote:

Stygian wrote: The Type 57S examples go for $4 million upwards

I had no idea they were worth that much

Yep Stu, Bugattis are a (very) rich man's car.

Thats where you are wrong. The guy that owns this car bought it in the 60,s. He sold everything he had at the time to get it. I always chuckle to myself when I think about that story a couple of years ago about the Bugatti in the barn for 40 years as this one has been doing the same thing. I have watched the guy that owns it over the last ten years rebuild the engine. He made the crank rods etc. The engine is a work of art.
He went out of his way to only clean things and even reuse the original wiring so the car still looks 75 years old.
The car has only just got back on the road late last year. He is just a working guy like the rest of us.
The biggest fear he has is the next guy will butcher it a turn it into 3 bugattis as the greed factor is huge on these cars. There are more fakes on the road now than were ever originally built. There is a place in south america that makes brand new ones for around $200000

i've heard a story of a 1929 bugatti in a farmers chook shed out this way sharing space with rare early mercedes's as well cars are gone now the guy died and he only had daughters that had no interest in his hobby
could be myth but the same guy told me the same story about 7 years apart and he's good at remembering his bullsh!t if it was cause the story was just about word for word from memory and there was no benefit in the story
the farmer apparently inherited 100 pound when he was young spent half on the bugatti and the rest on land everybody thought he was crazy buying the car

sevral farmers had Bugattis. The rich on the coast back then raced boats. The rich on the land raced cars.

bootlegger wrote:Thats where you are wrong.

You're kidding me, right? The Bugatti Royale was for years the most expensive car in the world, examples trading for US$8 million upwards since the 1980s. It was atrociously expensive when new too - 1930 chassis price was US$30,000. Only the rich could afford that in the Great Depression.

Current base price for the 1000hp Bugatti Veyron is US$2.4 million.

I rest my case.

I agree, however, that almost all of the prewar models of the thoroughbred European marques were undesirable in the 1950s and 60s - W.O. Bentleys, Brooklands Rileys, SS100 Jaguars and Bugattis were subject to some pretty rough treatment and a few destroyed in these times. These cars now fetch either hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. I figured the guy who scored the Type 57 you were lucky enough to experience picked it up for a pretty reasonable price in the 60s. Even then though, as you said, he had to sell everything he had to get it.

I think something went wrong in my interpretation of my post. You are right 99.9% percent of Bugatti owners are rich. just you were wrong in this instance.

I think that is the schlumf brothers collection. They went around after wwii and got every bug they could find. They ended up getting done by the tax dept and sued by their employees. The govt ended up seizing their assets.