Richard John Pietschmann
06/01/2005
Peter Mullin’s great love of 1930s French cars with curvaceous, custom-built bodies began as grand passions often do—with a chance encounter. The Los Angeles classic car collector said “yes” when a photographer asked if he could use Mullin’s house as the backdrop for an automobile calendar photography session. The car turned out to be a drop-dead gorgeous, pre-World War II Delahaye, built by a long-defunct French automaker that Mullin had never heard of.
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| THIS 1937 Delahaye SWB cabriolet was honored as Best of Show in the 2000
Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. (Photograph by Michael Furman ©2005.) |
For Mullin, that curiosity ignited a quest. “Interest became focus, focus became passion, passion became commitment and commitment became sickness,” he says. His first purchase was a 1948 Talbot-Lago T26 cabriolet —not a prewar car, but one with some of the same eye-catching features. Nearly a quarter-century later, he owns what is probably the most valuable collection of 1930s French cars in private hands. He demurs when asked how many are in his assemblage—“My wife says too many”—but at least seven were displayed at the Petersen Automotive Museum’s French Curves show, which ended its Los Angeles run in January.
Mullin’s vehicles include what serious collectors think is one of the finest examples of these rare automobiles: a 1938 Delahaye Type 165 V-12 cabriolet with a Figoni & Falaschi body created for the New York World’s Fair and one of just two cars like it (the other was made for Adrian Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son). If Mullin were today inclined to sell this masterpiece (an unlikely proposition), says Richard Adatto, a Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance judge, author and the foremost expert on these cars, “I don’t think he would sell it for less than eight or nine or $10 million, and somebody would pay him that.”
The market for these cars is intensely private, with perhaps 40 to 50 serious collectors around the world gathered into a loose society in which the cars change hands largely among its members. “A lot of horse-trading goes on in that small group,” Adatto says. Consequently, the best cars almost never come up at public auction.
“The most sophisticated collectors in the world have identified these cars as the best of the best,” says Mark Hyman, owner of Hyman Ltd. Classic Cars in St. Louis. “There are so few of them, and the sales are so private, that the money is secondary. The people who buy these cars spend what it takes to buy them. And once they go into certain collections, they never come out.”
Joining such an elite fraternity is not easy, and collectors eager to buy a prime auto from this era need more than money. According to Hyman, “It comes down to being in the loop, knowing who to talk to and talking to him at the right time.”
Haute
Horsepower
Fueled by the confluence of the Art Deco movement, aerodynamic
influences from the aircraft industry, the concours craze of showing off
magnificent cars and wealth-driven fashion, top-end automotive styling in 1930s
France exploded in a frenzy of creativity. For a decade, French carmakers,
designers and coachbuilders created hundreds of increasingly dazzling
automobiles that were remarkably beautiful, powerful, fast and technologically
advanced. Car designs that had previously favored boxy, high-standing models
became rolling works of art with flowing lines and prominent pontoon front
fenders. Aerodynamics produced teardrop shapes, closed wheel wells, raked
windshields and lowered everything to within a few inches of the ground.
“They’re just so dramatic and gorgeous,” says Ian Kelleher, managing director of
RM Auctions, an Ontario, Canada, company that is one of the best-known auction
houses dealing in these cars. Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive
Museum, cites their fluidity and grace.
| VALUE JUDGMENT Classic French cars from automakers such as Delage, Delahaye and Talbot-Lago are as striking as they are valuable. With sweeping curves and dramatic, aerodynamic features, certain models are worth upward of $10 million. Would-be collectors, however, may find it difficult to acquire these classics at any price. Current owners form an exclusive, if informal, club: They rarely sell these cars, and when they do, they usually sell among themselves. |
The bodies were individual works of art, superlative creations designed by true artists and executed by master craftsmen who literally pounded metal centimeter by centimeter until, after thousands of hours of painstaking effort, the finished car emerged from the shop. “I did some research on the time it took to construct a wooden frame, build the model, have the metal-beaters handcraft the bodies and then do all the finish work, and it typically added up to 2,000 to 2,400 hours per car,” Mullin says. Each car required three to four months to build. “If a coachbuilder made 10 cars a year, that was a lot,” he adds.
Body styles were usually produced in series that rarely exceeded a dozen cars. Because each vehicle differed from its brethren in numerous ways, however, some aficionados insist each car is a unique creation. “Each car was custom-made for an exact purpose,” says Adatto, whose new book, Passion to Perfection, is already considered a bible for collectors.
Cost was not a concern for wealthy buyers immunized from financial worries during the Great Depression. They would order one of these astonishingly expensive cars for a concours season or two, or even to coordinate with an outfit to be worn to the opera. Mullin’s World’s Fair Delahaye cost $36,000 new—which, at the time, would have purchased 40 Fords.
That same price ratio holds today—at the lower end of the market. The majority of these cars are today valued from $1 million to $3 million, says Kelleher, but the upper tier of the market is considerably higher. It is difficult to place a dollar figure on cars that almost never change hands, but if one were forced to pick a single model from this era as the most valuable, it would probably be the Bugatti 57SC Atlantic, a flowing coupe designed by Jean Bugatti. Three were made between 1936 and 1938, and Ralph Lauren owns one of them. “If Ralph Lauren were to sell, it wouldn’t be for less than $15 million or $20 million,” Adatto says. In fact, the true summit of the market may be even higher. He estimates a high of $25 million for the best of the 200 or so noteworthy cars.
Individuality and background are what set one car from this era apart from a similar one from the same carmaker and coachbuilder, especially on the highest-value tier. “Only a select few are considered real works of art,” Adatto says, “and the more provenance and history a car has, the more value it has.”
“Color, body design, originality, history, how the car started life—all
these things factor into the value of these cars,” Kelleher explains. “With cars
like this today, it’s the same process as authenticating a van Gogh.”
Private Parking
Unfortunately, it is difficult for an aspiring collector
to actually purchase one of these rare models. Kelleher estimates that while 20
or 30 of these cars change hands privately every year, just five sell publicly.
Getting into that loop might be a matter of acquiring lesser 1930s French cars
that do sell publicly, and restoring them so fully that they gain entry into the
concours circuit.
Another route is the one traveled initially by
Mullin—buying a postwar model. The French custom automobile business never fully
recovered after the war, most collectors agree, and had expired completely by
the early 1950s. Postwar cars can be found at prices in the hundreds of
thousands rather than the millions. Moreover, Hyman predicts that they will come
way up in value.
Whether French collector cars of the 1930s represent
investments to the people who buy and own them is a touchy subject with many of
their owners. Most serious collectors of these cars squirm when asked if their
assemblage is an investment or an indulgence. For most of them, the true answer
lies somewhere between the two—with a dose of stewardship thrown into the mix.
At the very least, Adatto says, these cars represent solid preservation of
capital. At best, they have outstripped most other high-value collectibles as
investments. “There is an inherent value to these cars, and they will always be
valuable, no matter what the stock market does,” Kelleher says. “And if you ever
need money, these cars will sell quickly and so privately that no one will
know.”
The plain fact is that as investment vehicles, the best of these cars
have performed superbly. Adatto says that if you bought one of the 14 teardrop
Talbot-Lagos several years ago, you probably would have paid $1 million for it.
“If you sold it at the next Christie’s Pebble Beach auction, you’d get $3
million for it, without even trying.”
Kelleher is even more bullish. Fifteen
years ago, he says, one of 10 Talbot-Lago 150SS models in existence would have
cost $150,000 to $200,000; today it is worth $2 million to $3.5 million. “It
would be remiss not to think of these cars as investments,” he says. “They are
like Berkshire-Hathaway stock. Over the last 10 years, they have appreciated at
a consistent and almost exponential annual rate of at least 20 percent. I don’t
see them dropping in price anytime soon.”
Richard John Pietschmann, based in Los Angeles, has written for Travel &
Leisure, Departures and Newsweek. pietsch3@aol.com.