|
|
 |
|
| Passion Investments: Auto |
Eternal Combustion
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.
 | THIS 1937 Delahaye SWB cabriolet was honored as Best of Show in the 2000
Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. (Photograph by Michael Furman ©2005.) |
“It was
one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen, and that got my interest piqued in
French cars,” Mullin says. “I started out in life as an art major, and so the
sculptured lines caught me immediately. I started asking myself questions: What
are these cars I’d never seen before? Why are they so beautiful? Why aren’t cars
today that beautiful?”
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.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
