Car Show Addiction

It all starts innocently enough. I go to car shows with a suspicion of who and what might show up, but there are always surprises. Whether it happens to be any Saturday morning at the Redmond Town Center, a first Saturday at Griot’s Garage in Tacoma, a drive in at the Triple X in Issaquah, the Annual ABFMs (All British Field Meets) in Kenmore, Vancouver or Portland, or any of the Seattle Seafair neighborhood car shows, something wonderful and unexpected invariably appears.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the high-powered Concours shows and auctions like those at Monterey Car Week and Pebble Beach, where one always expects to be amazed. A camera, or at the very least a good camera phone, is a necessity.

The eye candy, of course, is only the beginning. The history of each eye-catching car is inevitably one that includes intrigue, discovery, paradise found & lost, and lives forever changed. Often they begin because some fool was beguiled by a conglomeration of metal, rubber and glass passing as romantic transportation. Ah yes, but transportation to where….

Pocketbooks emptied, wives or girlfriends lost, families ignored, dreams of building, customizing or racing becoming all consuming – a singular, often destructive and rarely more than marginally successful mantra shaping the lives of dreamers, daredevils and would-be entrepreneurs. And, in the end, few regrets.

That is the calling card of a truly bedeviling mistress, one car entrepreneurs are helpless to ignore and who we know, deep in our hearts, may one day break them. But, they don’t seem to care, choosing instead to experience the dream, if even only for a little while. Those are the stories of excitement and seduction many cars have to tell, and many car enthusiasts wish they had the nerve and resources to pursue.

Pretty much by anyone’s standard, massive amounts of money are spent on all of these kinds of cars. Some to resurrect them from the dead to become the new owner’s dream car, some to recreate glory days of racing, or some to simply restore lost and glamorous beauty so the impact of history can be vicariously relived. Some is spent simply to show off. Any way you slice it, the ego of dreams, hopes, fears and experience are on display for all to see.

Whether these cars are old, original, restored or new, each contains the history of the blood, sweat and tears of its creators and owners. Even if the story is nothing more than the fastidious love and care of a car, there is something to be learned and considered about the person who commits to that.

So here we have Bugatti. A modern-day super luxury, high performance car with a mixed legacy of transcendent 1910 to 1930s engineering and racing prowess juxtaposed against its exit from car production a mere twenty-some years later. An enigma of sorts, Bugatti went through a couple of iterations before Volkswagen bought the rights and resurrected it as a top luxury brand. One wonders what a corporate automotive giant’s motivations were to purchase such a brand and its tiny industry niche. It couldn’t be about the money because on the grand scale of the car industry this doesn’t even move the needle.

An extreme example of the niche is the La Voiture Noire (The Black Car), a one-of-a-kind vehicle that cost the buyer a reported $18.7 million dollars in 2019. Built as an homage to the legendary Type 57 SC Atlantic, of which only four were made in the late ’30s, the car seeks to epitomize all that is Bugatti and its legacy – impeccable engineering, supreme luxury and the haute couture execution of the Bugatti aesthetic as art. How’s that for a mouthful?

At the other end of the Bugatti spectrum is the 1933 Type 59 race car. Only four works Type 59s were ever built, and remarkably all four made a memorable appearance at Pebble Beach in 2019 along with several other Bugattis and the La Voiture Noire.

Owned by Bugatti aficionado Ralph Lauren, the car above is the second by serial number of the four cars produced. While the Type 59 was a masterpiece of engineering, art and execution, due to rule changes it was never quite as competitive as originally envisioned. Lauren purchased the car above in 1986 and finished it in his signature black paint.

These cars were driven competitively by many famous drivers of the time, including Tazio Nuvolari at Monaco in 1934, Rene Dreyfus, who drove a couple of the cars in races in ’33 and ’34 (including a win at the Belgium GP and a couple of 3rds), and Francis Curzon, Lord Howe.

Innovations included the hollow front axles, and an all new, supercharged, double overhead cam, 2.8L straight 8 engine. The most striking, however, were the incredibly stunning piano wire aluminum wheels. No one had used aluminum for wheels before, much less considered a piano wire in the construction as performed on the Type 59s. Not only do the wires hold the wheel rim to the hub, they also secure the brake drums to the hub’s gear toothed interface. It’s also interesting to note how the wheels are balanced – a small amount of lead strip is wound around a spoke. Look closely at the Lauren car and you can see some on both the front and rear wheels.

Not since the 1934 Grand Prix season have these four cars been seen together. And while they never achieved the racing success envisioned for them, they nevertheless hold an esteemed place in the pantheon of Grand Prix racers. Their engineering innovation combined with the beauty and precision of their build make them cars of a historic nature from a builder of unsurpassed prestige in his time. That all four cars have even survived is amazing, but that probably is due at least in part to Bugatti’s always sterling reputation.

In the end, cars are a romance of man and machine represented on every level one can imagine. There cannot be seduction without passion. And obviously, every car in a show exudes the passions of many people, some whose lives are fulfilled beyond the imagination of most and others whose dreams were toyed with and, in the end, cruelly crushed.

As car lovers we don’t often distinguish much between the success or failure of the business side. We consider that if there was a car created at all, then the endeavor, the dream, on some scale must have been a success. And there is plenty of success to be examined and learned about.