[CHASING CARS] Nigel Boothman’s Market headliners
US museum sale’s Type 35B has hardly been touched for almost seven decades
Bewildering Bugatti Type 35B market may play into the sale of this mostly original car, but will its price race ahead of its $1m-$1.8m (£820,000-£1.47m) estimate?
This is chassis 4947, a 1930 Bugatti Type 35B, the most desirable of all the T35 variants thanks to its 2.3-litre supercharged engine. With only six owners in its 95-year life, and the most recent ownership lasting 65 years, it’s an unusually original example of a type so often raced, crashed, rebuilt, restored and re-created from spare parts. With the same chassis, engine and back axle that left Molsheim together, plus many parts and portions of the body, it’s not a perfect survivor but it’s a remarkably intact example, considering a lively competition life in the Thirties and Forties.
It’s one of the star cars offered by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, as part of a liquidation of more than £100m of assets announced in autumn 2024. Some of these cars, such as the Mercedes-Benz W196R Streamliner featured in our November 2024 issue, will already have been sold by the time this Bugatti comes up at RM Sotheby’s Miami sale on 27 and 28 February. It carries an estimate of $1m-$1.8m (£820k-£1.47m) – a wide range, but one that looks almost modest compared with some stand-out results for Type 35s in recent years.
The market for the most famous and celebrated Bugatti model can be confusing, because values now appear to be disobeying the old order. In short, those that are best described as recreations start at £150,000-£200,000 for newly-made copies or ‘bitsas’ with a low proportion of original parts, rising to around £750,000 as a larger proportion of genuine Bugatti bits make an appearance. Yet genuine cars with a specification change or the wrong engine have sold well within this range too, including a pair around £500,000 in 2024: both were non-supercharged 2.0-litre Type 35As, later upgraded with different engines.
‘With the same chassis, engine and back axle that left Molsheim together, it’s not a perfect survivor but a remarkably intact example’
What of the jump to seven-figure prices for the truly genuine cars, then? There were eye-catching results from as recently as February 2023 when a lovely 35C made €2.2m (£1.85m) with Artcurial in Paris, after Bonhams took exactly €2m (£1.68m) for a 35B in Monaco, the previous May. Both results remain in the shade of the $5.6m (£4.58m) Gooding & Co achieved for a 35B at Pebble Beach in 2021 and the £3.95m that was taken for a memorably patinated 35C at Hampton Court in 2020. Yet by October 2024, Bonhams could not shift an excellent Type 35A with 60 years of single-family ownership at its Zoute sale, which was estimated at €1.2m-€1.4m (£1.01m-£1.18m).
True, those sky-high prices were achieved for cars with amazing stories – the $5.6m car was raced by Louis Chiron and won the French GP. Yet the chance to buy the car pictured here for less than £1m still seems surprising, even if its on-track exploits were in the hands of less famous names. There will be a sizeable recommissioning bill and the white seating looks odd to modern eyes, but if this is the new level for proper Type 35Bs with continuous history, it’s certainly a readjustment.
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