Bugatti-builders – get ready! Bugatti-historians, too

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Stuck with your Bugatti-project and looking for that one obsolete part to get going again? Look no further! Bonhams Auctioneers have found a secret stash of Bugatti parts and are selling it as separate lots in their upcoming Legends of the Road sale on February 19th. It’s in their New Bond Street, London, premises, but you don’t even need to be there. Just a few mouse clicks can get you into the action to secure that long-lost propeller shaft, crankcase, track rod, steering arm, leaf spring, king pin, camshaft, clutch part, brake bits, speedometer, rare Scintilla magneto or Furet-Gergovia jack or even an engine block or a gearbox.

Bugatti Type 57

Much of it is for the Type 57, so we expect it to come from one and the same source. It probably all lived under the same roof with the extraordinary Corsica bodied Type 57S Grand Routier that is offered in the very same sale? Now that’s a stunner of a car with one owner for the past 51 years: tractor and digger manufacturer JCB’s chief engineer Bill Turnbull. There’s no doubt that the late Turnbull was the best custodian thinkable, but before him there had of course been others. The car was sold new to Robert Ropner – the then 28-years old heir to a shipping-line family who traded in his Mercedes 540K on the Grand Routier. Once fitted with the low Corsica body, the car was registered DUL 351 in March 1937.

After having been hidden during the War years, the Bugatti’s next owners became Connaught co-founder Rodney Clarke, museum curator H.H. Coglan and doctor Kenneth Cock. Turnbull was next in line, acquiring the Type 57 in 1969. In the next decades he managed to interview Ropner and the car’s later owners intensively about all things Bugatti – and this one in particular, leaving an unrivalled history file. Among the notes is Ropner’s explanation on how he had taken the car back to France when it was just two months old, where lapping the Montlhéry Autodrome at up to 112mph had resulted in his returning it to the factory for engine repairs - free of charge. Meanwhile, he didn’t forget to visit the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère, as scrapbook pictures seem to confirm. Priceless! Well, the estimate of 5 to 7 million pounds is not exactly that, but this car seems worthy of that.

Words by Jeroen Booij. Pictures courtesy of Bonhams Auctioneers.

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