Petersen Automotive Museum Vault (Part 1) - CAR and DRIVER

we're here at the famous Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles but we're not up on the display floors we're actually down in the basement the area known as the vaults we're down here because the Petersen museum is in the fortunate situation of actually having more cars than they can put on display at any given time I'm here with Wesley Kendal the chief curator of the museum how many cars do you guys have in this collection well in the collection we have about 400 vehicles but we're only able to display about 150 to 175 at one time so the remaining part of our collection we keep in our subterranean storage area called the vault and down here it's nice and cool and dry and the cars remain in good shape until they get their turn in the spotlight well they're still in good shape when they go upstairs down here it's a very stable environment the the temperature doesn't change very much because we are underground and it's it's a very secure place well there's a whole bunch of cars down here as you can see and we're actually going to do two different videos on these cars in an attempt to give you a sense of what is down here the first video we're going to cover really historically interesting cars that anyone can appreciate and in the second video we're going to cover cars that this is Hollywood after all that were owned by famous people and have a real heritage to them so let's get started Leslie let's do it now most of the cars in the museum and just about all the cars are real and genuine cars but this one's a replica why is this a replica well you hit it on the head the Petersen museum is not about replicas we're about the real thing but the original of this car is so important and since only one survives we felt obliged to have replicas so that we could at least give people a representation of how important this car is and it helped explain it so if this car is so important what is that original car what does it represent well the original cars in 1886 Benz Karl Benz built his first car in 1886 a lot of people consider it the first viable automobile the first vehicle that was designed from the ground up to be an automobile not an adaptation of a horse-drawn carriage and that Karl Benz is the Benz in Mercedes Benz which exists to this day right right the and diamond companies did not merge into mercedes-benz until 1926 so they were still operating independently and interestingly they both built cars individually in 1886 without knowledge of each other and so they basically share the co invention of the modern car more or less yeah you could say that they share the invention of the modern car well let's walk back and look at the engine because it was really the engine that made this car possible now I guess this is an internal combustion gasoline engine of sorts from 100 plus years ago well this is an internal combustion fossil fuel engine back then they use benzene instead of gasoline it's it's was more available it's what they had and all the mechanism is out and accessible you can see it and it's a really a wonderful teaching tool you can see the camshaft you can see the make-and-break ignition the flywheel obviously the crank shafts the bevel gears it's really interesting and it looks like it has just one single cylinder it has sort of a spark plug up there it has sort of a carburetor and as his giant flywheel doesn't it it's got it's got the really interesting components and it's probably the only car that you could actually confuse the carburetor the gas tank of the radiator they're all metal cylinders about the same size and this didn't have much of a transmission I mean this looks like a leather belt drive it was a leather belt dry there were two pulleys the lever engaged the pulley or disengaged it and engage the brake and once this car was out there and sort of proved the concept of a self-propelled car that's what got the industry off and running and eventually produced everything else in here well Carl's wife Bertha actually took this on one of the first long-distance trip she made it to her destination and back and people were impressed by that kind of performance and they thought you know what if they can do it if they can make that kind of viable automobile then maybe I can too and a lot of inventors were inspired to do just that well it's interesting it's fascinating car does it run this car runs skyrise is operational it's a little tippy I wouldn't throw it into a corner it really is a genuine authentic 1880s motoring experience we're so lucky to have it one of these days I have to come back here and talk you into a ride this is a 1912 de dion-bouton I'm familiar with the Dion suspensions but I didn't know they built cars how important was this company back then well Diddy on was one of the world's very first companies to mass-produce the automobile to sell it in significant numbers a similar model they had a very interesting racing cars and they were also one of the first companies to mass-produce a v8 engine way ahead of anybody else even Henry Ford but I look at this one this doesn't seem to have a v8 under the hood this is definitely not a v8 this is a vertical twin it's a little 2 cylinder car the ideal car for French driving conditions of the day was narrow it was lightweight it was sprightly it couldn't go very fast but it could maneuver in on cobblestone roads and tight situations now this doesn't have what we call the Dion rear suspension it's more conventional for its day isn't it right this is fairly conventional in in its layout and suspension and engineering but they got pretty adventurous later on how long did this company stay in business Danyelle Bhutto lasted until about the early 30s interestingly they went from a v8 to a straight-8 engine and some of the last cars they had were actually straight aids now that were those last cars big luxury cars is that the direction the company went exactly towards the end it got bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more luxurious and a lot of their cars were extremely expensive coachbuilt vehicles and then the depression took them out the depression did what it did to an awful lot of manufacturers especially the luxury manufacturers whose market was dwindling they ended up going out of business because the customer base was no longer there how did the museum come to acquire this car this car was acquired by the Petersen museum and a bequest a fellow by the name of Gordon Howard a good friend of the museum past and he specified that twelve of his vehicles go to the museum we could be more thrilled to have it now fantastic and it really adds variety to this collection doesn't it it does it offers a counterpoint to the American driving experience like the Mercer right next to it it shows the differences between between the two schools of thought on my left is a 2005 Ford GT and you guys are probably all familiar with that car but this is a Ford gt40 mark 3 and this is the first road-going Ford GT back in the 60s when gt40s were race cars Leslie why would it Ford build a road-going version of the gt40 back then well to qualify a car for the class of racing that Ford had in mind for this they had to build a certain minimum number of them so they considered a production car believe the number was 25 of the mark 3 versions they built seven they built four left hand drive and three right hand drive this is one of the rare left-hand drive versions okay and so if they built seven of these they probably counted some of the mark 1 racecars to make their minimum qualification I believe that's exactly what they did yes well and you know that seems like an arcane thing to do but Ford won at LeMans 66 and 67 with mark 2 and Mark four prototypes but then they won in 68 and 69 with GTS and those were only possible to race because they had homologated these car because they built enough that they consider it a production car now this has what a 289 v8 in it yes it does extremely high performance 289 it's a fiberglass body it has doors that open into the roof not like a Mercedes going's but they're so low that that's about the only way you can get into it in fact the gt40 name is derived in part from the fact that this car is only 40 inches high from road to roof well this is a great example of the car and back in the late 80s I tested a gt40 and I can't remember if was a mark 3 or a mark 1 but it was Road licensed and it was a fantastic car and you get into these endurance racers and they tend to be pretty comfortable because you know you had to drive them for hours at a time and they have good visibility and the car was a rocketship in the 80s this thing is insane it is so fast the clutch travel is about an eighth of an inch all the way and all the way out but but you know what you aren't worried about slipping the clutch too much on this car you were either all on or all off that it really was a perfect car for a race like Lamar very very long-legged car well it's not surprising that it's a fast car even by modern standards because when you think that it's a road-going version of a car that actually one lamothe got to be fast yeah it's got it has all the right goodies on it I mean it's it's it's a mid-engine vehicle first of all first / forward it also has four weight balance it has the gas tanks one on each side and then there's two fillers one on each side of the front front flanks and you've got a radiator in the front the entrance in the back so you've got the the cooling system that goes that goes from one direction to the other all in all is but it's really a competent road car but it's a little warm on a hot day because you don't have air conditioning you don't have roll down Windows you can hinge the windows open but only by about that much so it's best to drive late in the day early in the morning or during the winter time well it's interesting to compare this car with the newer Ford GT because you know this car is compact and tidy and very sleek looking until you compare it to this one and this is all smaller and tidier and more purposeful well they look really really similar and it's easy to see where ford got the inspiration and it was natural that they would build a version like that because it was the retro era a time when retro cars were popular and why not replicate Ford's lamang winning car well you don't get much better heritage in this car this is a marvelous heritage Carroll Shelby was involved in the design it's everything that a high-class long-distance racer needs to be this is a 1955 Ford Thunderbird was this the first year for the Thunderbird Leslie and did Ford build this car to compete with the Corvette that had just come out in 53 this is indeed the first year 1955 was the first year for the Ford Thunderbird and Ford did build this car in part to compete with against Chevrolet Corvette but also to compete with the other kind of upscale two-seater cars that were coming in from Europe they wanted to be ready with the two-seater just in case this craze took off well as this car as 40 as it looked or was it just kind of a two-seat Ford sedan well by 1950 standards it was a very sporty car it was a fairly short wheelbase but still have a large engine but it was more of a boulevardier it was more of a personal car and that's exactly how 4 it advertised it as a personal car now or these v8 powered all Thunderbirds were v8 powered and were they all convertibles at least in this era yeah the 1955 670 burrs were all convertibles they're all open cars you could get a hardtop or a soft top or both or neither now I notice this hardtop doesn't have the famous porthole in it when did those start appearing well you could get a porthole later in 1955 a lot of customers started to complain because they couldn't see out of the car because of this tremendous blind spot so for thought well let's let's engineer a little porthole and put it in there they experimented with a couple of different designs and settled on that and a lot of people like that better than the plain version now the Corvette survived is a two seater from 1953 to this very day but the Thunderbird didn't last all that long as a two-seater when did it become a four seater and why did Ford do that well for change it from a 2 to a four seater beginning with the 1958 model year and they did that for purely marketing reasons they did their research and I thought you know what we could sell a heck of a lot more of these that they could see to more people so they did and history has proven that they were right well it was a very long-lived nameplate and it went on from this 1955 car pretty much continuously until the mid 90s and then was actually reborn again with a retro that's right retro cars tend not to last very long because you kind of satisfy the market pretty quickly and you really don't have a plan B for how you're going to evolve a retro car if you evolve it it's no longer retro so Ford made that second version of the two-seater Thunderbird a great looking car a personal car just just like the original and but no Thunderbirds anymore well at least this is where it all started Leslie this looks like a Porsche 356 but it says Continental on it and I know a little bit about Porsches but I've never heard of this well you could be forgiven for thinking this is a garden-variety Porsche 356 and in a way it is this was built and marketed in America because of a fellow by the name of max Hoffman who is of course a importer back in the 1950s during the day Porsche called the model the 356 which is what it was max Hoffman said you know what Americans would be much more likely to buy this car if you gave it a sexier name and Porsche thought well okay you're the boss I mean you're the importer to America so you probably know what you're doing you said let's call it Continental that'll give it an hour of elegance because the continent of Europe it will imply Grand Touring and other positive things so for a while during 1955 Porsche did they put the Continental badge on each side of the car on each front fender then they got a phone call from Ford Ford said you know what you can't call your car the Continental we own the name Continental you're going to have to think of something else so interestingly Porsche said okay we won't use Continental we get it you're bigger than us we're not going to argue with you we'll call it the European so believe it or not for about five or six weeks during 1955-1956 there's actually a Porsche European it had European script on the side but it was intended for the American market it's an interesting story because max Hoffman was also the Mercedes importer I think he's the guy who convinced Mercedes to do the gullwing so generally he was not out to lunch on his suggestions but perhaps on this one he kind of missed the boat probably his best call were there any other changes on the car from the European 356 other than the name not really but you can tell that this particular car was intended for the America market primarily because of the white walls if you like it's got giant white wall tires with unidirectional air vent rings around it that you know - for the right and - for the left they're very specific and it's it's kind of a boulevardier it's a it's a plush European sports car but very much in the American market so maybe the plushest porsche until the appearance of the Panamera recently absolutely you could say that I suppose it's a very comfortable driving car it's a nice overstuffed seats at the top is well padded so you insulate it not only from the the temperature what's going on outside but from the noise as well lovely car this is a 67 Dodge Coronet and while it looks as plain-jane as a white refrigerator this is really a muscle car isn't it this thing that gets you down the road a lot quicker than any refrigerator is going to the secret behind this car is the 426 Hemi engine under the hood the racing Hemi dual four-barrel carburetors underneath it and you could be forgiven for thinking that this car is grandma's grocery-getter because it looks it doesn't look very menacing but once you get under the hood and see what powers this bad boy once you get your foot on it there's no mistake well and you know Dodge built obvious muscle cars like the charger but this thing was built as a drag car to actually race at the strip and you see things like the lack of wipers and the simple steel wheels and no options on it so this was a serious race car wasn't it well it was a serious race car you make some very good observations because this car was delivered intentionally without wipers without hubcaps even the battery was moved from the front to the trunk for a bit of an improved weight distribution and it also has his gigantic hood scoop on the front that it needed to gulp all that air for the big engine well Chrysler in those days was really serious about building his performance reputation by helping drag racers so that's remade these cars available I I heard that some of these were actually asked to dip to make them a little lighter than normal do you know if that was the case well I've heard that too that is some of them were asked to dip to make the panel's lighter and some of them were actually had fiberglass body panels also now this car looks perfectly clean but do you think this example was actually raced back in the day my hunch is that this example was indeed raced in the day very few people would have bought one of these in this extremely unusual car rare when it was new and almost impossible to find today so if you had the money to buy one of these back in the day chances are you were going to go racing with it and that is a very reason that Chrysler did not supply a guarantee with this car they knew what you were going to do with it why was a 16 years old back in 1967 when this car was current and I remember looking around at him and you paid a few hundred bucks to get a 440 and it was a much bigger increment to get the Hemi because it was the serious race motor well the Hemi was a complicated engine to build do you have a cross push rods and a lot of other things that that a regular overhead valve engine didn't have it was all worth it because the power was substantially greater and today these cars are worth a pretty penny these cars anything with the 426 Hemi badge on the side is worth a whole lot more than its than its counterparts this is the 1967 Toyota 2000gt and this has to be the sexiest Toyota built since the recent Lexus LFA what was Toyota thinking to build a car like this back in the mid-60s well you're right about the sexy part this has to be the Japan's first supercar the idea behind this car was to build something that could rival the best that Europe had to offer in terms of sports car and GT cars and actually was it a design of Toyotas own it was designed by Yamaha and offered to other manufacturers who refused it Toyota was the one that took them up on it and ended up building the archetypical Japanese sports car very long hood very short deck so Yamaha designed the whole car because I know Yamaha has a history up until the present day of working on high-performance Toyota engines but they did this whole car I don't think they did the whole car what they did was mostly the mechanism and they laid out the components and that the engine was a double overhead cam inline six kind of like a Jaguar engine except there was only two liters instead of four liters or so you're absolutely right the very early ones in the Toyota 2000s word double overhead cam the later 2000 GTS had single overhead cam engines and the roofline even looks vaguely Jaguar asked I mean this is a fastback that looks very much like an e-type coupe of the era so well inspiration or copy yeah you're right you're right then you know the Japanese designers derive their inspiration from it wherever they could find it and why not be inspired by the best how long were these cars in production and roughly how many were built this car was in production only a couple years during the late 60s and only about 200 250 were built did most of them come to the US very few of them came to the US but this is one of those rare examples that not only was a u.s. car was actually delivered new in Los Angeles sold new right here in LA and it's unrestored this car has not been restore it was repainted once the original solar red but the interior is 100% original and so is the engine well it looks to be in great shape and of course coming to the u.s. its left hand drive in Japan they would have been right-hand drive where most of these cars right-hand drive do you know I would think that most of these were indeed right-hand drive and also because of where they were raced there were a lot of them were raced abroad and even Carroll Shelby had a hand in preparing some of these for racing well it's an amazing time capsule and it's a remarkable to think that beneath the bland skin of a Camry there is some some of the genealogy of a car like this well Toyota has a lot of history and a lot of history to be proud of and this is a marvelous car anyway you look at it this is the FEU sniper and it strikes me like sort of the modern idiom of custom cars that have an old look but a little bit of a more modern technology what what is this car based on this car is based on the mechanicals of a Viper a v10 very potent Dodge car all about performance this is exactly as you mentioned it's a kind of car that that appealed to people who want the look of an earlier car mid 50s kind of a rounded automobile with mana performance modern reliability where does the look of this car come from what is it harken back to well this part began live is the 1954 Plymouth convertible and it really speaks to the genius of Chip Foose that he was able to take a car like that and mold it and and reconfigure it in such a way that it still looks like a 54 Plymouth Savoy but it's very updated and there's there's almost there's almost nothing 54 Plymouth really about this car well when you say it started out life as a 54 Plymouth you mean it started out from on a piece of paper or physically the parts were 54 Plymouth that he modified the car was a 54 Plymouth at that Chip Foose modified by putting it on a viper platform and giving it a lot of visual enhancements and from what I gather it's not just the Viper v10 but it has Viper suspension as well and Viper brakes so it's really a pretty modern car that way it has all the Viper underpinnings making it a very modern very reliable car to drive now this car seems very very low and I look at it I would think that has no suspension travel at all and probably rides horribly have you driven this car and how does it work on the road this car runs absolutely fine I can assure you it's comfortable to drive in of course it's a performance car so it's a it's um it's pretty tight so it's not something that you you know you glide over potholes in because it's it's a pretty competent road car and for a competent Road car that's exactly what you want and I mean it doesn't really have a backseat but it looks like these two front seats are pretty comfortable and the interior of this car is as stylized as the outside isn't it well this car is all about business so you've got front seats that really hold you in place and you don't have it back you've got a package shelf instead this is the 1925 Ford golden star one of the great street rods and this was a real award winner wasn't it this car won the America's most beautiful roadster trophy twice in 1989 and 1991 only a tiny handful of cars have ever had that honor twice who built this car this car was built by Army immersive air very famous hot rod builder from Southern California and you look at this it is different from a 1925 Ford as you can possibly imagine because the idea when you're competing in for the America's most beautiful roadster trophy is to have something that is completely different from anybody else's to show new things to be as innovative design wise as possible well one of the differences I see is this engine and it is a Ford engine but it's the double overhead cam v8 that Ford designed to go Indy car racing in early 60s or so and to see that in a street car 25 years after that race is just amazing well we don't think that Ford had this car in mind when it was developing that engine but it certainly fits nicely and it's just the kind of thing that would capture the judges attention well it's got a cool detail to it too because as I recall with that Ford engine the exhaust came out the center went out the back and here it looks like they had to reverse the cylinder heads in order to get the exhaust at the bottoms a CLE what they did the intake is on the top the exhaust is on the side and out through the back and other interesting things about this engine are they are the 24 karat gold-plated details of velocity stacks the hose clamps a lot of things on this engine but again it's just to capture the attention of the judges is though and it really increases the wow factor now a lot of these cars don't necessarily drive terribly well but you know this looks pretty serious it has big brakes on it these look like wet road racing tires I don't know how well this car goes but it sure looks like it would go pretty well well it looks like it would go pretty well but I don't know that you'd want to drive this car because every mile that you put on it it finishes its jewel-like appearance was this car ever restored or is this as built this is as built is exactly as it left the 1991 America's most beautiful roaster award well I guess when you don't accumulate a lot of miles it's a little easier to maintain your condition now you've mentioned that you exercise the cars in the vault because it's good for the cars to keep them from drying out that's right do you even exercise a car like this one ok there are a couple of cars that we're not going to exercise this is one of them there's their cars with with engines that are prepared for show purposes that really weren't meant to be driven driving those cars isn't what it was about it was about more how they looked and we want to be sensitive to that and so those particular kinds of cars we just leave him alone this is a 1952 Ferrari barqueta back in those days was this a racing car or street car were they more or less the same well this particular cars a little bit of both it's got some racing elements and some street car elements primarily it's a road car that was delivered brand new with the racing engine that's why we call it a 2 12/2 25 the 212 is a chassis the 225 is the engine of upgraded racing engine and does that mean it was a bigger engine because in those days didn't the 212 signify the displacement per cylinder of the v12 that's exactly what happened it's not only a larger engine slightly larger but it's got better cooperation and it has a higher performance higher compression ratio and other enhancements because of its racing nature now I understand this particular car was given by Enzo Ferrari to Henry Ford the second how did that happen well there was a time when for in Ferrari we're thinking about getting together and Ferrari wanted a curry for its favor so he gave them this car but I thought that the Ford Ferrari potential marriage was in the 60s but this would have happened in the 50s were they already talking about what they were already talking about it there was a lot of background that didn't just happen in the 60s there was quite a bit that led up to it ok I see on the badge on the hood that this car was bodied by touring and these days you know we think of Ferraris as Pininfarina bodied cars or maybe Scalia tea bodied cars and cars for the last 20 or 30 years seem to have been that way when did Ferrari switch from Turing to these other coachbuilders well there's a time in Ferrari history very early on where Enzo Ferrari didn't really know what the look of his cars is going to be and it didn't end up being Pininfarina solidly until the 1950s so he experimented with different coach builders just to get the right look a touring Superleggera was one of the early ones Ghia bodied a lot of early coach work sort of in yawl a and some others what a Superleggera mean Superleggera is Italian for superlight and it's a type of construction that touring used to keep the weight down of its bodies so does that mean aluminum body and tube frame that is exactly what it means it means that the tube frame is constructed almost like the bones and then the skin which is the aluminum body is put on that then the whole structure is welded to the chassis in looking at this interior there's sort of this almost this leather combing with a baseball glove type of stitching on here was this standard or some unusual detail on this car well this is fairly typical of touring Superleggera but only Superleggera I think there might have been one or two others that had that but it was just a way to give this distr encar more of a luxury feel I understand this car is original it's a 60 year old car with original paint and unrestored you're absolutely right this car has not been touched it's the original paint the engine has never been out or a part the tires are even date coded to within one or two years of 1952 so who knows about the tires fantastic an amazing car it's glorious this is a 1929 DuPont Model G and I've never heard of the DuPont car company is this the same company that makes chemicals and if so how did they get into the car business as a matter of fact is is the same company that made the chemicals and the son of the scion of the DuPont family thought that he want to build cars who his dad said okay sure go ahead and build a car so he put a company together and he and he did just that well this looks like a very sporting car was that the intent here this is really sporting car it's a very large car but it's so rakish it come it has a great presence to it it's powered by a straight eight Continental engine which is it's a flathead engine but it's got a cover on it to make it look like it was an overhead valve design which is what a lot of people did in the style-conscious 1920's 1930's I kind of wanted to make make their engines you know seem a little bit more than they actually were a couple of other unique things about this car from the front are the would light headlights those quirky little lights with with the slits lenses that the selling point was that they would refract light in a certain way that would actually throw a better beam than regular did they do that they did not do that in fact in fact it was they were really deplorable but they sure look good especially on the car like this the other distinctive feature of this car is the genuine Lalique radiator mascot Lalique had a couple of dozen different varieties of those that you could pick out of a catalog there were hundreds of manufacturers of radiator mascots in the day and Lalique was probably probably one of the best known a lot of motorists what they would do is they would put it on a plinth that had a little light in it so when you turn on the headlights at night that would light up very cool now who designed this body did do a young DuPont designer did he hire someone to do the body on this car was designed by Merrimack a company that did a lot of DuPont bodies I was a coach builder to a lot of different Detroit manufacturers but this one is especially interesting because it's one of two Roadster versions available there was a tapered tail roadster that had the spare tire sitting on the top and you had a boat tail which is this really sexy bow tail and it really does look like the end of a canoe turned upside down when you're looking at it from the back it's it's really a striking striking design well the other cool thing about this is I noticed this front fender turns into a running board and is one continuous piece goes into the rear fender and it's sort of spaced out from the body so it's wide but it doesn't look wide it gives it a sense of openness there right the car is very narrow but the fenders stick out from the body a good six or eight inches in some parts and it gives it a whole different feel it separates it and it gives it a look of its own it gives it a whole different sweep of wine it's a great looking car but the is how successful was it how long was the DuPont car company in business well the DuPont wasn't in business for very long they only lasted from about the late teens to the early 30s and then by that time they were done it's like so many cars it died during the Depression there just wasn't the market base out there to keep it going and this car cost over $5,000 brand-new in 1929 and that was enough for a house and a half in the day well it's a real shame because from that era this has to be one of the prettiest American cars well this is this is such a pretty car it has great presence it has a very unusual grill treatment and it was special enough that for Mary Pickford because she had one identical to this car but unfortunately only one DuPont Model T speedsters know to have been destroyed and it was hers this is a 1925 rolls-royce phantom with a special body by young Kara but before we talk about that body tell me what differentiated a phantom from a regular rolls-royce if in fact any rolls-royce could be a regular car well for a long time rolls-royce had a one model policy when they were done with the Silver Ghost when they evolved back to the degree that they that they could they brought out another model which was the phantom instead of having two blocks of three cylinders that had one block of six cylinders very big cylinders over seven liters that could push this car down the road at a pretty good clip what was the idea behind this body I see that this is described as an aerodynamic coupe and I see these teardrop headlights and the full wheel covers in the fastback but why make a car like this aerodynamic well when you think of the times rolls-royce didn't sell the entire car when you're what you were buying from the rolls-royce factory was a chassis the chassis the frame rails the engine the running gear the wheels and axles everything that you needed to make the car actually go down the road and then you would send it to a coach builder and the body would be built and the body could be built to any specification of your choice was that was that true for all Rolls Royces are just the Phantom every rolls-royce before World War two was delivered in chassis form only from factory and then an individual coachbuilder would finish it for the customer this car actually started out life in 1925 as a cab relay by Hoover but as a apparently not a very inspired design because in 1934 when it was nine years old the owner of the time we believe somebody living in Belgium had that body thrown away and had this body built for it when your rolls-royce body wears out you don't throw the whole car away Rolls Royce is much too expensive a chassis you just had a new body built and the individual had it built in an aerodynamic style which keep in mind this is 1934 so we're in the height of the Art Deco era we ran of geometric shapes and round sweeping contours and covered wheels those are all fashionable then and they took it one step further and they gave it a sloping grille one of only about half-a-dozen rolls-royce ever delivered new before world war ii with the sloping grille they also gave it a fin that rises to 18 inches in the rear duct to sunroofs round doors and windows on the doors that open in a fan pattern now that has nothing to do with aerodynamics that's just pure style isn't it that has nothing to do with aerodynamics and you said it it's pure style the reason this car was built to wit was to win Concord elegance back van you had to capture the eye of the judges he had to stand out in a very very bold way and obviously the original owner of this car took a number of prizes including the prix donor it can in the mid 1930s this car seems very high I mean it's as tall as I am is the the frame so high on these cars is that why it's so high off the ground the frame is extremely high in fact the floor of this car comes up to about here now you said before that this car was actually junked at some point and someone found it in a junkyard and brought it from there to this magnificent shape yeah keep in mind that in the in the 40s and early 50s this was a used car and it was a crazy used car fins were all the rage Cadillacs and things like that and even though this car had one giant fin in the back it wasn't what people were looking for so this found its way to a junkyard in New Jersey believe it or not and an entrepreneur by the name of Max Obi discovered it fixed it up had it painted gold and then took it around to various auto shows and charged people a dollar to enter an enclosure to look at it at this car along with other cars and then eventually someone else found it and restored it to its original condition right the car changed hands a couple of times later it actually at one time ended up appliance white and that is a condition that mr. Peterson found it and we had it completely restored back to a more correct color for the era we're pretty sure it wasn't white originally so we thought that black would suit the contours of the car and show it off to its best this is a 1939 bugatti type 57 adelante and aren't those type 57s among the most treasured Bugattis well they certainly made more of them than they did almost any other model was the last Bugatti that was made before the war in any numbers with the type 57 and the s and F C and C variants was very very popular because it gave a lot of coach builders enough wheelbase to work with and Bill's build some pretty creative swoopy things on them now this is a gang law car isn't it right a gang clock was a coach builder very near to where Bugattis workshop was in Multan and these adelante is a lot of the ones I've seen have all had some sort of fin on the roof or on the back end right this one has some of that too this one has a little hint of a fin on the rear it doesn't have anything on the roof because the roof on this car is actually canvas and it rolls back just over just over the seat the frame rails on the side are fixed but the roof can roll back for that extra bit of sunshine I noticed that the doors here are hinged in the back and open from the front is that true on all 57 s as well or most of them well it depends on the coachbuilder if you were the original owner and you wanted your door hinge at the front and latched in the back you could have had it that way too now what's under the hood of this type 57 under the hood is a 3.3 liter straight-8 double overhead cam engine with a supercharger pretty potent machine in this day now is this purely a road-going car were there any 57 s that were raised well the ty 57 was intended to be a road-going car but there were 5:57 that were raised ty 57g was the model that was most closely associated with racing well I've seen quite a few of these cars and each one's prettier than the next one and this is just a great example here well it's hard to go wrong on the Bugatti you've got that marvellous horseshoe radiator you've got the wheelbase to give you room to to put some style in there and again it's the height of the Art Deco era and and the the coach builders were really out there at the top of their game well you can really see that and yeah this is as much a piece of art as a mechanical device it's a piece of sculpture well that gives you a flavour of the hundred fifty or so cars down here in the vaults of the Petersen Automotive Museum as you can see they cover every era there's every type of car they cover a variety of styles if you want to see these cars firsthand Leslie how can someone come in here well there's plenty of opportunity we have tours throughout the week in the morning and in the afternoon I would encourage people to go on Petersen org for specific times that's it for part one of our Petersen vault tours we're also going to do part two when we're going to look at another sampling of interesting cars except these cars also have really interesting owners I'm chubby chata see you next time

Channel: Car and Driver

Views: 323,019

Rating: 4.85568 out of 5

Keywords: Mercedes-Benz, Porsche 356, Porsche, Csaba Csere, Bugatti, Car and Driver, Petersen Museum, Chip Foose, Dodge, Coronet, DuPont, Bugatti Type 57, Rollys Royce, History, Foose, Ford GT, Ferrari, Rollys Royce Phantom, Thrunderbird, automotive history, Petersen Automtoive Museum, Phantom, C&D, Ford, CandD, Vault, De Dion Bouton, Toyota, Toyota 2000GT, Ferrari 212, Ferrar Barchetta, Car and Driver Magazine, Vintage Cars, Petersen Automotive Museum (Museum), Museum Tours

Id: 7qaHlml1XWs

Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2013