Mustang II Concept from 1963

It was once hypothetical, but now that the City of Detroit has filed for municipal bankruptcy, and since no legislation has been passed in Lansing to prevent it, it’s possible that a bankruptcy judge will order that city assets, including the art collection of the city owned Detroit Institute of Arts, estimated to be worth $2.5 billion or more, be sold to satisfy creditors, mostly public employee unions and city pensioneers. A less well known collection of artifacts more closely related to Detroit’s role as the Motor City, and perhaps nearer to the hearts of our readers (not that you’re Philistines who can’t appreciate fine art, but this is not The Truth About Art), could also be sold off to give creditors a few more pennies on the dollar.

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While Equitorial Guinea is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa,  only half of the people have access to clean, safe drinking water. One fifth of children born in the country die before they are five years old. Two years ago the French government raided the €80 million, 101-room mansion near the Champs Elysees belonging to Teodorin Obiang, the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in power since 1979. Among the treasures found in the mansion were a cache of supercars, which have now been sold off.

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Love ’em or hate ’em, car auctions are a part of the hobby. The hype is annoying, but the only true way to gauge something’s value right now is to put it up for sale. In that case, the most valuable car in the world today is Mercedes-Benz W196R chassis number 00006/54. It sold at Bonhams‘ auction held in conjunction with this year’s Goodwood Festival for $29,619,826, shattering the record for price paid for a car at auction. The previous most expensive car in the world, a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa went for $16,390,000 in 2011 at Pebble Beach. One of 10 surviving cars out of 14 W196R racers made, it’s the car’s provenance that makes it so valuable. Sir Stirling Moss raced it, but more significantly, Juan Manuel Fangio drove this car to victory at the Grands Prix in Germany and Switzerland in 1954, on his way to the world championship that year.

Another Mercedes-Benz car with provenance associated with two well known figures will be going on the block at Auctions America’s upcoming auction in Burbank, California. That’s an appropriate location to be selling the 1957 300 SL roadster owned by two notable television personalities, Robert Stack and Desi Arnaz. In 1960, Stack was enjoying the success of the Untouchables tv show, produced by Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s Desilu studio. A car guy who raced Model A Fords and speedboats, he considered buying a used 300SL in a Mercedes-Benz showroom on Sunset Blvd. In 1998 he told Motor Trend, “the lines were just beautiful…Every day I’d look at it, and my wife would ask why don’t I just save up and get it. Well, I’d never pay that much money for a car for myself.” Someone else bought the car, but unbeknownst to Stack it was his friend and boss Arnaz, who knew of Stack’s desire for the car. That year Stack won an Emmy for his role on the Untouchables while Arnaz was winning one for producing the show. After the ceremony, they were basking in their success. “We’re standing around holding the Emmys and Desi says ‘Let’s go outside, Amigo.’ All of a sudden I hear a roar and around the corner screams this green Mercedes and a guy with Mercedes overalls gets out and says ‘Mr. Stack, here are your keys.’” Stack owned the car until his death in 2003. Since then it’s been repainted in a dark red, but it’s otherwise close to original condition, with blue California UNTCHBL license plates.

The 300 SL was popular in Hollywood but other celebrities preferred the gravitas of the so-called grosser Mercedes, the 1974 600 Pullman limousine, an example of which will also cross the block at the Burbank auction. One of only 429 long wheelbase 600 series cars, it also has celebrity provenance, having been owned by the British acid jazz band Jamiroquai  and is said to have appeared in one of their music videos.

Though much of the attention paid to new automotive drivetrains recently has focused on hybrids and battery electric vehicles, the simple fact is that internal combustion engines are going to be around for a while. They’re still teaching the old dog a few tricks and even coming up with a new breed or two as can be seen every year at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress, in Detroit’s Cobo Hall. There is always at least a handful of inventors and promoters at the SAE confab showing off their new engine designs. Maybe it’s the romantic idea of a lone inventor trying to prove his concept in the face of a skeptical world, but after looking over the convention program, the booth that I most wanted to visit was that for the Waissi Engine, the invention of Gary Waissi, an engineering professor at Arizona State University. (Read More…)

Cadillac Ciel

Car enthusiasts seem to love to play the what-if game when it comes to their favorite concept cars that never made it to production. If only the suits would listen to our better judgment they’d be rolling in the do-re-me and we’d be rolling down the road in our dream cars. With certain brands, the same names keep popping up. Talk about reviving Lincoln, and 2002’s Continental concept is cited as being brand-true, along with the Mark IX coupe from the previous year and the later Mark X convertible based on the Thunderbird/LS platform. Now comes word in a story leaked to the Automotive News, that Cadillac will not be putting the Ciel show car, another high profile show car from a luxury maker that enthusiasts hoped would see production. Neither the Ciel nor any sedan derived from that open four door car will be made. People working on the Ciel based flagship have been reassigned to other projects. (Read More…)

She’s not particularly well known in the United States, perhaps because Alice Ramsey’s 1909 cross-continental motor car trip gets the lioness’ share of attention on this side of the Atlantic, but if you’re a car guy or a car girl, you should know about Dorothy Levitt (1882-1922), who was not only one of the first women to drive an automobile, she’s documented as being the first woman in England to race a car, 110 years ago. (Read More…)

It’s not unusual for automakers to wrap themselves in their national flags. After citing baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, and sponsoring Dinah Shore to tell us in song to see the USA, Chevrolet is the car company that comes to mind pretty quickly when considering automotive nationalism, but they all do it one way or another, in their home markets. Export markets too, in the case of German and Japanese cars. Those cases might be nationalism or they might just be good marketing but there was once an American car company whose founder was so patriotic that he built a copy of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall for his company headquarters. Actually, there were two car company founders that did that. You may know about one of those buildings and you undoubtedly know about who built it because it’s called the Henry Ford Museum. Percy Owens, however, is less well known, and he built his copy of Independence Hall before Ford has his own replica of America’s architectural symbol of independence made. There are other replicas and near replicas across the country, mostly at colleges, Mercer, Howard, Dartmouth, Brooklyn and Dallas Baptist. Knott’s Berry Farm in California also built a full-scale replica outside their Buena Park amusement park in 1996, but the Motor City is the only place there are two. (Read More…)

Did you see the video about Ford’s new panel forming tech? Ford’s Freeform Fabrication Technology, F3T. Gizmodo called it a 3D printer for sheet metal but I think it’s more of a new take on traditional metal shaping tools since it’s essentially taking a large power hammer, reducing the scale of the work tools down to stylus size so very small sections of the panel are shaped at a time and digitizing the process.

I think it has potential for the car hobby well beyond letting Ford make prototype parts or short run niche vehicle body panels fast. I think it could bring coachbuilding to the masses. Right now it takes a lot of specialty machines and tools and years and years of apprenticing and metal shaping to be able to make a one-off fender, let alone an entire car. Imagine being able to take a CAD drawing of the car of your dreams, downloading it into a machine, and watch it start shaping fenders, hoods and doors.

What a cool idea!

What a freaking scary idea! (Read More…)

One of my favorite Formula One memories is from the inaugural (and only) Dallas Grand Prix, in 1984, involving my favorite team, the Colin Chapman era Lotus (though by 1984 Chapman had already died) and one of my favorite drivers, Nigel Mansell, forever shattering a stereotype of F1 drivers as prima donnas. Now you can own the Lotus 95T that he drove that day. Today’s F1 cars have a Drag Reduction System, DRS, as well as being able to use energy recovered with regenerative braking by the Kinetic Energy Recovery System, KERS. Both allow the driver to push a button and go faster, not entirely unlike IndyCar’s “push to pass” system that momentarily increases engine power. Twenty-nine years ago this week, Mansell had no such technical aids. Instead of push to pass, he pushed, literally, until he passed out. (Read More…)

The news that the police departments in California routinely scan and record license plates to create a database that can be used to retroactively track any driver’s motions and activities broke at political and civil liberty websites and is now percolating through the autoblogosphere. Jack Baruth wrote about it here at TTAC yesterday. Jalopnik has picked up the story today. Like the current issue over NSA monitoring of electronic communication involves balancing national security with Americans’ privacy from government intrusion, recording and tracking license plates can be a useful tool in solving crime but it also seems contrary to American values and rights like freedom of motion and freedom from random surveillance without probable cause. Still, if I had a vote on the matter, since law enforcement in this country hasn’t exactly had a sterling record in protecting civil liberties, I wouldn’t trust them with this technology. Who knows how the political system will eventually deal with this news, but in the meantime remember that for every technology there is some way to defeat it. In this case, it might even be legal. (Read More…)

I’ve been fascinated by reverse trikes for a long time. As young teens, my older brother and I made a reverse trike go-kart (he designed the frame and the drivetrain, I did the brakes and steering) because we didn’t have the money for a proper live axle setup in the back. The first hard turn taught us something about the inherent instability of three wheel vehicles. The inside front wheel lifted about 18″ off of the pavement (maybe that’s why I like the photo of Jim Clark’s Lotus Cortina cornering on three wheels so much). It took a bit more than a “dab of oppo” to settle it back down. I don’t remember if either one of us ever completely rolled it, but it was exciting to drive. Now comes word that Morgan’s revived 3 Wheeler, a car that seems to be able to drift and donut effortlessly while still keeping both front wheels planted firmly on terra firma, has become their best selling vehicle, prompting word of expanding the 3 Wheeler line. With that success my attention has once again been drawn to reverse trikes. I’m not the only one. Based on design patent drawings, it looks like Polaris will be soon introducing the Slingshot, a side by side reverse trike powered by a GM Ecotec 2.4 L four cylinder. From the styling the Slingshot looks to be aimed more at Ariel Atom fans than the traditional stringback driving glove set, so I don’t think the Morgan will lose any sales to Polaris, but either way, I think the Polaris will increase the popularity of three wheelers in general.

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Mildred Lambrecht and her son Mark. circa 1953

As our esteemed colleague Mr. Baruth pointed out, it’s not every day that you can buy dealer fresh 50 year old Chevys, referring to the upcoming auction of over 500 cars owned by Ray P. Lambrecht, now 95 years old, who with his wife Mildred and a single mechanic ran Lambrecht Chevrolet, a small rural dealership in Pierce, Nebraska from 1946 to 1996. The collection includes a startling number of new old stock cars, time-capsules that were never sold or registered as well as trade ins that Lambrecht and his Mildred decided to keep. Though it’s not on the scale of Barney Pollard’s massive inventory, I suspect that in time, as with former Pollard cars, the provenance of being a “Lambrecht Chevy” will be a factor in those cars’ collector value. A number of comments to Jack’s post wondered what the story was behind the collection. Fortunately, the auction description at VanDerBrink’s Auctions website was written by the Lambrechts’ own daughter, Jeannie Lambrecht Stillwell, who gives the human side to the Lambrecht Chevys:

The Man Behind the Legend
The Story of Ray P. Lambrecht and Lambrecht Chevrolet Company
by Jeannie Lambrecht Stillwell

Urban legends speak of a former Midwest Chevy dealer with a collection of hundreds of vehicles hidden away in a rural setting. Rumors abound regarding this man and the mystery of that collection. The man behind that legend is my father, Ray P. Lambrecht. Dad owned and operated Lambrecht Chevrolet Company from 1946 until 1996, selling new Chevrolets to multiple generations of families all over the Midwest and beyond. This is his story. (Read More…)

People that don’t live in the Detroit area often assume that car shows and similar events in the region are all focused on American iron and Detroit muscle. The fact is that car guys in Detroit are pretty much like car guys everywhere and most can appreciate all automotive excellence. That’s true within the auto industry as well. Engineers and designers working for GM, Ford and Chrysler have respect for the work of their colleagues both across town and across the oceans. The earliest expression of Cadillac’s brand identifying “Art & Science” styling theme was the Evoq roadster concept, designed by Kip Wasenko, now retired from GM Design. The first time that I met Kip was when I pulled up next to his Ferrari Dino on north Woodward a few days before the Woodward Dream Cruise.

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While watching the video of Elon Musk demonstrating Tesla’s new battery swap mechanism that will be installed at the EV company’s ‘supercharger’ stations (Musk prefers to call them “Tesla stations”) I remembered something that Tom Wolfe wrote about air-cooled Volkswagens in his 1968 compilation, The Pumphouse Gang. (Read More…)