Here's why the most valuable car on Earth will NEVER be sold!

in what could possibly be at that time one of the most expensive cars in the world because the story is told that Jay Leno who was very into to duesenbergs walked up to Jimmy with literally a blank check and said you put whatever number you want on this and I want to buy the first dusenberg [Music] the first of any car is always a special thing it becomes more special when it's from an amazing brand I got to work with when I first started working at canipa they were already one year into the restoration of the first production dusenberg now Duesenberg for the younger guys out there was the car to have pre-World War II and they were ferociously expensive the model JS were what every movie star drove and it was the car to have and they were twice as expensive as a Cadillac or a Packard back then it was creme de La Creme to drive a dusenberg and if you take a dezenberg for years to a concourse you almost always won and they were they're just the standard you heard if you ever heard the phrase that's a doozy that's where it comes from the dusenberg so we're working on the first production dusenberg which has a great story The duesenbergs built engines and race cars pre you know pre-war pre World War I we're talking pre-war and during World War I they built aircraft engines Marine Engines they were Geniuses they were fantastic Engineers they had never built their own road cars they built engines for other companies for cars but they never built their own production car so an equivalency of this would kind of be like McLaren for years built amazing race cars and never built a street car and then all of a sudden they build the F1 and you're like wow they built a car and it's worth millions and it's extraordinary and everybody has to have it the duesenbergs after the war their demand for their military stuff fell off and they realized that they had maybe to start producing their own car to stay solvent and they had a few very wealthy people who were kind of pushing him towards that and this was 1919 and one of those gentlemen was Samuel Castle now who he was was the son of the guy who found Castle cook foods in Hawaii in 1851 and he is 7 feet tall he's a 7 foot tall missionary from Hawaii and they own I think 95% of lenai the island of laai which is the sixth largest island in Hawaiian chain they most of aahoo um through certain means of missionar and political stuff which I won't get into but Hawaii's history is a bit Shady in that way but an enormously wealthy man politician and you know big in sugar cane and and things like that his company eventually would become dle foods which a lot of people know so he's like I want a dezenberg road car you guys need to build a road car and it took wealthy people like him to convince him of that and I'm like okay all right well we'll build a road car now they build race cars that's what they do so a road car was a little foreign to them so they built the road car kind of like their race cars so their first car was called the straight eight in retrospect a lot of people call it the model A but they were never called the model A in the day they only called the model A once the model j came out but they were called the straight A they had a fabulous straight eight logo with wings on it it was really cool and the it was the first road car with a straight eight and it had overhead cam straight 8 it was the most powerful engine ever put in a street car and again it was like bu McLaren building putting a race car engine in a street version so this had 88 horsepower and this is back in the day when cars had like 40 or 50 so double the power of a normal car that could approach 100 miles an hour and a in manufacturer back then usually build especially the high-end guys would build the chassis the engine and everything and then they would send it to a body maker a coach maker to build the body so they built this amazing chassis basically big race car straight eight and the other thing the first time ever in history four-wheel hydraulic brakes which was Race Car Technology back then so first time that ever been put on a car they sent this over to a company called Bender to build the chass the the body on it because a lot of these bodybuilders were descendants of people who built carriages back in the 1800s and they would build you whatever you want they could build you Sleek bodies coups limousines they would turn these chassis into what ever he wanted and he wanted a coupe but again 7 feet tall and we have a picture of him and you're like yeah man was huge so the proportions of the car are kindly to say ungainly it is not the most attractive car in the world especially since the later duburs were so beautiful it kind of like something that a missionary would drive it was black it was very stayed looking and kind of Square I got to sit in it and they had to make a pad which the pad was in there from when we found it that you pushed a normal person towards the the you know like a kid would have to have like something behind them to steer a normal person needed the pad to get close to the steering wheel and the pedals that's how big this guy was they built this kind of strange body for it and sent it to him on a three masted Schooner is the story that it was sent over to Hawaii and it wasn't finished until 1921 1 and that's when model a production began they sent it over and you know he must have been the king of Hawaii at that point like to have a car over there would be one thing but to have a duberg race car another thing that the car had which we found when we were restoring it was really cool is a exhaust cut off so there was a lever inside where you could just send the exhaust right out the engine instead of out the back nice little race car thing and that's how you could get close to 100 miles an hour hour with it was with the cutout so you can imagine him blazing down these dirt roads in Hawaii with the straight eight cutout going and just ripping through must have been a blast so he had the car for quite some time the model j came out and it was our understanding that when it came out that he sent his car back to dusenberg cross the ocean back to Indianapolis to have it updated with more J Parts like to kind of make it cooler and they did they changed the fenders a little bit they different steering wheel and a couple little bits nothing drastic and then sent it back to him again on a ship it remained in Hawaii for quite some time he passed away Samuel Castle passed away in 1959 I believe and it went to his nephew um James castle and he decided to bring it over in the 60s to San Francisco this family stories go that eventually as the car got older it was just used as like a pickup truck like they would just throw stuff in it they'd Bounce Around Hawaii and the kids would get to drive it and there were stories of like the cows trying to eat the interior through the window so it it had little value at that point as far as you know being what it was the first dusenberg they bring it over there was an article in a San Francisco newspaper about the first dusenberg being brought over on a ship and a picture of it coming off the ship that I found I was researching it as the historian then it went and did a show in 1968 and then went to storage and sat kind of in storage for years and eventually went to uh James Castle's son Jimmy Castle Jimmy Jr who is the person who eventually brought it to canipa and interestingly enough Bruce is famous for obviously Porsches and you know Shelby Cobras and you know certain types of really cars but he's not known for pre-war Restorations Jimmy's like well you you've done my other cars you need to do the dusenberg and Bruce goes no that's that's not what I do you know Bruce knows his limits he was like that's I'd love to but no and I guess he bugged Bruce for like three or four years until Bruce finally went okay you're you know you're a great friend a great customer let's let's see what it is they bring it over and they start disassembling it and they hire a few Specialists to work on it the guy who led the charge was Dave staltz and he is a master fabricator and funny enough is the guy who's going to be working on the rocky yokei Porsche with me so he's there working on the first dusenberg he takes it apart and this car have been sitting in Hawaii for decades in Hawaii of course is a tropical region does Tropical weather does not like cars you have saltwater in the air you have you know the the humidity and dampness and the car is made out of a lot of different things in fact then you know the the chassis was steel the skin over the body was aluminum the body itself the framing of the body was made out of wood and beautiful Ashwood body underneath the interior was wool so there was mildew and mold and where aluminum meets steel you have reactions and it was just a mess as it came apart but the goal was Bruce hired Specialists for each different element and he insisted that every part of the car that could be saved had to be saved so if there was a rotted part in the fender you don't roll whole new Fender you cut that little section out and you make that little section and weld it in so that kind of meticulous work took years it wasn't until 2013 that it was done there photographs of the body of the of the of the wood interior being done and they would cut out just the rotted parts and make another piece of wood and then glue it in so it fit perfectly in the grain matched up like that's the meticulousness that went into it so that there was as much of the original car as possible all the J stuff that had been added to it were removed so that it would go back to the way it came out of the factory and one of the reasons for this is there weren't many pictures of this car we found four four photographs of this the entire restoration had to happen from four pictures luckily they're all from slightly different angles and can kind of see the interior so we could see what the material was inside but we blew them up I got on Photoshop we enhanced them we did as much as we could with it to find out every specific detail so had to redo the wheels had to redo the bottoms of the fenders and I still have a couple pieces of the thrown away steel at my house like I've got a piece of the first dusenberg over the years they slowly reassembled the whole thing and the goal was to get it to Pebble Beach in 2013 during that build time of course you know there's a when you do Restorations there's lots of slow work but as you get close to the days that it's going to happen everything kind of snowballs and right at the end it's got to get together and it you have to get the engine on the chassis and the body over the the frame and and they start putting it together and I remember Bruce taking out for its first test drive down the streets of Scotts Valley California in what could possibly be at that time one of the most expensive cars in the world because the story is told that Jay Leno who was very into to duesenbergs walked up to Jimmy with literally a blank check and said you put whatever number you want on this and I want to buy the first dusenberg and Jimmy insisted that it had to stay in the family so that was it no no check well thank you very much but numbers are being thrown around like $50 million in 2013 about what this would be worth and some people said even more but it would never be sold so we'll we'll never know so he's driving this 50 million car for its first time down the roads in traffic and comes back he's like it's not running really it's not running right and now we're getting within weeks of Pebble Beach and everybody's getting a little nervous the interior is done it's not running right they find and this is within a week of having to go to Pebble a crack in the straight eight block you know it's Run for the first time in decades and you know talking about really old old materials they find a crack in it what do you do it's like you're not going to go machine a new do ber block you're not going to go find a straight eight loner somewhere and put it in there and it's also you the body has to be taken off to get the engine out because it's so massive so they have to fix it in the car and this was one of the coolest things I saw there there's a company that makes these little screw inserts you drill a hole and you screw in the insert into the end of a crack then you drill halfway through that first insert and you screw in another one and you Stitch these things together and it's actually strong ER than the block itself and they you they do these things in massive scale when cruise ships fail like in Port thousands of miles from a dock they will go out and they put these massive things to fix the blocks of you know cruise ship engines so this is a smaller version we called the owner of the company and him he came out himself he heard the first dusenberg was doing it so he flew out with him and his wife came out worked over overnight stitching this thing together bit by bit and one mistake right and you're done next morning fixed next morning turn it on perfect little bit of buffing little cleaning didn't even know and it was far way far back on the end of the engine towards the firewall it was diffic difficult place to get to they did it amazing save right before it has to go to Pebble Beach needless to say we made it to Pebble Beach which it was a huge hit there now for people who have never been to a very high-end Concourse The Concourse is more about the people and the politics than it really is about the cars we had brought the first dusenberg restored perfectly we had advice from the dusenberg Museum from dusenberg experts uh everything on it was exactly the way they took it apart and put back together again it was meticulously gone through in the dusenberg class it took second place and people were hacked off as you'd imagine Jimmy totally cool he's like whatever he's I want to drive my kid my grandkids to McDonald's in this he's like this was just for fun but for the team it was hurt and Jay Leno actually was there when the judges came through and they picked out some nitpicky thing about the car and Jay Leno who had by the way has a flip phone which I thought was funny flip is his phone calls his dusenberg guy and he's all like no talk to him this is correct this is correct Jay Lena was trying to defend the car there on the field and uh they're like no no no you've got 10 minutes to fix this wiring thing that the wires were wired incorrectly to the tail lights or something was weird like that and Charlie Burton who is one of the head Builders there he's under there fixing it and gets it right they bring the judges back and look we we fixed it uh no they gave it like you know the classic car award or something some kind of you know secondary award really we had people come over to us afterwards and they're like who were pretty famous people I can't mention but they're like that car should have won its class that car should have won best of show hands down there were politics going on and it's unfortunate when it comes to that but this was amazing it would go on to win another Concourse that we sent it to and it it went on to get some claim but Jimmy wasn't really interested in showing it Jimmy wanted to drive it and he did in fact he drove it at the Pebble Beach they have a drive before The Concourse that if you drive your car in that drive around Pebble Beach with these amazing cars that if two cars tie the car that did the drive wins that's the tiebreaker and Jimmy's like yeah I'm going to drive it and it drove great he had a great time in it and that's that was his idea I'm going to drive it he goes yeah I spent all this money on it it's going to stay in the family we're going to drive it we're going to have fun with it and that's what he did for years but eventually he's like you know his family wasn't Ed in it they're not I guess car people like he is and Jimmy's a big car nut so he's like what do I do with it I don't want to sell it I want it to leave the family and I don't want it to move into another hands so his decision was to donate it perpetually to a museum the Auburn core dusenberg Museum in Indiana which seems to like the appropriate place I think First Choice was like the smithonian because of its history but the dusenberg museum obviously fantastic and the idea was that is a Perpetual donation which means that the museum can never sell it to an individual it has to go from them if they lose it to another Museum that it will be forever in the hands of the public that people will always be able to see the first Stenberg and enjoy it and enjoy its story just the way I do so if you get a chance go out to Indiana go to the museum and check out the most awesome first dusenberg over the last four years we partnered with gloss to show off some of their amazing detailing products give you 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 889,899

Keywords: vinwiki, car stories, automotive, car enthusiast, storytelling, car trek, ed bolian, vehicle history, carfax, car guy, automotive adventure, exotic cars, supercars, car story, road trip, cars

Id: JGsJZhnF0uY

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2024