[Spam] Re: [Ducati] (NDC) I want one of these! Well, maybe not!

[MS&F]

You guuys can have your toys, this one's for me!

NEW YORK -- A rare Nazi-era race car hidden in a German mine shaft 
during World War II and said to be worth millions of dollars went on 
display Thursday.

The sleek silver D-Type from Audi forerunner Auto Union was on display 
until Friday at the car company's fancy showroom on Park Avenue. It will 
be auctioned as part of Christie's Retromobile auto sale on Feb. 17 in 
Paris and is expected to fetch between $12 million and $15 million.

While Adolph Hitler gave about 500,000 reichsmarks to Auto Union and 
Mercedes-Benz to promote racing and technology, the car is not 
specifically affiliated with the Third Reich, Christie's said.

The car, one of only two in existence, is thought to be the grandfather 
of modern race cars. It revolutionized racing by putting the driver in 
front of the engine instead of behind it and reached speeds up to 185 mph.

"This car was really quite ahead of its time," said Rupert Banner, head 
of Christie's International Motor Cars division. "It was revolutionary. 
It changed the face of racing."

More than 20 Auto Union series cars were built between 1933 and 1939. 
This model, which has a body shaped like an airplane fuselage, was 
designed by Ferdinand Porsche. The driver sits sunken into the body of 
the metal, and the wheels, which look like oversize bicycle tires, have 
independent suspension.

"There was a kind of memory loss after the war," said Audi historian 
Thomas Erdmann. "It took really until the early 1960s and later on to 
the 1980s for car design to catch up to these cars."

During the European motorsports heyday just before World War II, the 
D-Type won the 1939 French Grand Prix. The Silver Arrow, as it was 
known, also was filmed winding through country roads for use in 
newsreels across Europe. In racing, German cars were always silver, 
British were racing green and French were blue.

During World War II, Auto Union workers hid the cars in a mine shaft in 
eastern Germany to avoid using them for scrap metal. After the war, the 
Russians discovered the cars in the mine shaft and took them to Russia, 
along with dismantled Auto Union factories, to recreate motorsports.

"They vanished, lost behind the Iron Curtain," Erdmann said.

The Russians did not do much with racing, and the cars eventually were 
taken apart. An American car collector came across car parts in a scrap 
heap in Ukraine and took them back to England, where experts Crosthwaite 
& Gardiner restored this car. Christie's didn't say who is selling it.

Audi owns three Auto Union race cars, and another car was owned by a 
corporation, but Christie's didn't know which.

If the car displayed Thursday does fetch the estimated $15 million, it 
will be a new record for a car at auction. The current record is $9.8 
million, for a 1931 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Sports Coupe, which sold at 
Christie's in London in 1987.


On the Net:

Christie's: http://www.christies.com
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