WE FOUND THE BIGGEST BUGATTI COLLECTION IN AMERICA

[Music] good morning hi i'm rick ebers welcome to the mall and automotive museum here in beautiful oxnard california i've been a dozen here for about 10 years and today we have a very special time because we're going to be focused on just some of the gems and car show winners and our first car here is actually very important because it won pebble beach in 2011 as the best in show it's a 1935 wasang called the arrow dean and the wasan cars uh mr gabriel wasan started out building airplanes and he built a whole lot of airplanes up to world war one and after world war one he started building automobiles and he built them all in about the same way that he built his airplane so almost all those cars have aluminum bodies and they are all very sleek and you can even see the hood ornament here it looks like a bird it's called the coquette and it has these struts to hold up the front fenders much like that you would see on an airplane it is a two-tone car and another interesting feature of the car is this whole roof recedes back over the trunk and it has little windows in the top so that when you put the top back you can see out of the rear window now i'm going to come around here and open the door so you can look inside at this lovely interior now you have to think about this interior going down the road in 1935 how much would that shock the people to see something this geometrically uh developed when this car was restored uh mr mullen actually had to find a loom to build this fabric and to get it set up for the restoration for this car and all the other wasans that we have there's only unfortunately about 52 hassan's left in the world and we have 17 of them in our collection and mr mullen likes to find things that are kind of really interesting not well known and kind of bring them back and so wasan was one of those kind of rare producers that a lot of people never heard of before particularly outside of france and he was able to not only restore this car but kind of bring wasan back into the everyday parlance of today's society if you look at the dash you can see the dash looks like an airplane and that's because uh of course gabrielle osama's building airplanes on the far left hand side of the dash you might see there's two black circular units that have smaller circular units inside of it that's actually your fuse panel now if you're in an airplane you don't want the fuses under the hood because you can't get out of the side of the plane and fix them so you put them on the inside the other thing you might notice on the steering wheel is this beautiful chrome piece coming down here and i always ask our visitors what they think that does and hardly anyone can guess but it is actually the horn so when you push in on this unit it makes contact back here completes your circuit and that honks the horn on the far right hand side of the dash there are two brown colored units here those are actually your infinite adjustable shock absorbers and so as you're driving the car in real time you can tighten or loosen the shock absorbers based upon the kind of road surface that you're on another interesting feature on each of the doors has a leak ash tray i don't think i've seen many other cars i don't think i've seen any cars that actually had the leak ash so this is our 1935 wasan aradine that won pebble beach in 2011. as i mentioned to you we have one of the largest collection of wasan's in the world and this is another great example this is a 1934 when you're earlier than the last car you saw this is also a song and one thing interesting about gabrielle hassan in the age of bespoke cars where people one person would build a chassis and someone else would build the body gabrielle assange was one of the people who actually designed and built his own bodies for his cars however this particular car is an exception because this car was the chassis was purchased by the shah of persia which eventually became iran and it was then taken to a very famous person named fagoni and fagoni was the person who designed and had the body built for this car and fagoni was probably one of the best automotive body designers of the period and is still known today as having some of the the greatest designs ever for cars we actually have quite a few of his works here in our collection so this car is uh called the grand sport uh they only made two of these chassis and we happen to own both of them uh one has a body that was built by gabriel assan and this one of course has a body that was built by fagoni it has this lovely wood trim all the way around this hand carved wood trim and with the ostrich skin interior in it you can also see again the horn up here that you saw in the aradine interesting story about this car the child of persia used to drive this car around with his gun bearer sitting next to him and if he saw anything a wild animal whatever that he wanted to go after he would just stop the car and would go hunting so interesting car mr mullen was able to purchase his car and had this total complete restoration it's uh won many many awards and it's just one of the most beautiful cars i think we have in our collection i would say that many women who come to our museum prefer this as the car they like the best at least that's what they tell me but it's hard to choose given all the choices that we have so this is again the 1934 wasan grand sport uh with the body by fagoni well this is the 1937 tabalargo it's called the teardrop car it's shaped like a teardrop in fact some people think that mr fagoni was also the designer of this car saw teardrop come down the cheek of his wife and he said there's nothing more naturally occurring a symmetrical element in the world than a teardrop now this car actually is a race car it raced and came in second at le mans and the next year its sister came in first so it is a race car uh and when le mans first started the grand prix racing were actually street legal cars not like you see today with the formula one cars so this car is a six cylinder has about 140 horsepower it also has a wilson pre-selector on it which is a racing feature that allows you to shift gears without actually reaching down to touch a shifting lever you just have a lever in this case it's on the column and you move it where you want it it also has a sunroof on it and fagoni was a person who invented sunroofs so it's kind of an interesting combination of features if you look behind the doors in the back you'll see the traffic haters or turn signals the friend of one of the owners said he thought he could drive this car from paris to nice france in less time than it took the train and it took the train he made quite a large bet and took the train about 10 hours and he was able to drive this car from paris to nice in nine hours and 45 minutes and he won a large amount of money so it's really interesting you think about this uh driving through the maritime alps in this kind of car in curvy roads and still going as fast as you could see if we can open the door here you can see on the inside is a bench seat rather than bucket seats and if you look at the steering column you can see the uh the wilson pre-selector and of course the beautiful built-in luggage behind the seats here these are what we would call touring cars and that meant that you would get in your car and drive around the countryside and stop off at little ends and you needed to have your luggage i believe we're opening the hood here which is a real treat to see this lovely engine gorgeous aluminum engine like i said 140 horsepower three carburetors beautifully finished and you can actually see what they did in a lot of the french cars they put the name of the car down below into the block and the interesting thing of course about all these cars is the inside of the cars are just as well finished as the outside and they're actually all pieces of artwork some of these engines when you see them running it's like watching way beautiful swiss watch movements they're just very smooth very calm but yet very powerful well we have another fagoni car here uh that is a 1937 delahaye 135 actually ms because it's got three carburetors it's a six-cylinder engine beautiful body by fagoni this car actually was purchased by a gentleman in england and shortly after he picked up the car he was an international trader he had the car shipped to india and he was friends with several maharajas over there and one of the maharajas who was a pretty high ranking prince car and basically said i want the car and he ended up buying the car from the englishman the car was then handed down to several different other maharajas and as it got handed down one of maharajas was actually in a car accident with it where the rear end and the front end were damaged the maharaja somehow thought that he could restore the car himself and so he started the restoration and was never able to finish it and eventually another englishman was able to buy the car after it set up on blocks for many years and took the car apart and shipped all the parts back to england where it was restored by a british company the british company evidently didn't know delahaye very well because they didn't put the headlights in the right spot which i think probably the maharaja had made that mistake himself but when mr mullen eventually bought this car he undertook a complete restoration and restored the headlights to where they're supposed to be built into these pontoon fenders now fagoni had his workshop near an airport in france and outside of paris and because he had this close proximity to an airport he was very highly influenced by aeronautical design he was also lucky because a lot of people that own airplanes could afford to buy his cars so if you look at the the bulbous fenders up here that is a really a sign of fagoni it is thought that he got these from the aerodynamic uh bubbles that were around the landing gear of airplanes and so if you think of some of the old airplanes that look like this this flowing pontoon we think that might have been part of the inspiration for the car now i've had this car at pebble beach it's won many awards there i also take this car had his car at keels and wheels which is a lovely event in texas where it won best in show for european car uh they do a best show for american car investing show for european uh lovely thing about fagoni cars is that he would have these beautiful little taillights in the back built right into the end of these fenders now when you think of these cars you have to think of these being built as a the bodies being built as a patchwork quilt made out of smaller pieces so these are all smaller pieces that are all put together to form these individual body panels so they're not like stamped out of any kind of format they're individually made so getting all these pieces to come back into that final in is quite a trick and quite an artistic achievement our next car has nothing to do with fagoni but it is an interesting car because it has a french chassis it has a body designed by a czechoslovakian and built by frenchman so it's kind of an interesting combination of uh cars this is the 1938 dubenae hispana suiza also known as the zinnia mr dubinay who was the uh son of the gentleman who invented the dubane aperitif uh was a world war one air uh airplane fi fighter pilot and became an aeronautical designer and uh actually became a person that was an engineer and really interested in suspension pieces and so he uh came up with this hispanic swissa chassis and made quite a few really wonderful suspension improvements one is called the hyperflex suspension which actually he licensed to general motors for quite a few years and in order to show off his uh great suspension he personally designed this one-off body so this is a one-of-one car even though it's hispanic squeeze the body has uh just 101 designed which he designed and then a gentleman named salcek was the person who actually was the karassie who built it the car is called the zenia he named it after his first wife and when she died he did get remarried and the story is that his second wife was not pleased that there was a car around named the zinnia and said that he should get rid of it and he evidently put it away in hiding and i guess fortunately the marriage didn't last very long but he still ended up with his car there's many interesting features on this car the most radical thing you probably would notice out of all the things that are radical is the windshield which is a curved piece of glass we think the first time it was ever used on a car also the side windows are curved and even the side rear windows are curved the top actually is a target top and the whole top can lift off and the windows do not go down the windows only come up on the side if you come back to the back you might notice that some people think this car was the one that inspired the batmobile given its radical design it also has you'll call it a trunk here that lifts up and there's custom-built luggage that's designed on angles to fit into this area interesting historical piece about this car is this car right after world war ii uh led the parade through the uh the saint cloud tunnel when they reopened it after world war ii and so this car was the first car that went through there the car actually came back to france a few years ago when they reenacted that opening of the saint cloud tunnel and there was an interesting historical piece there also in that a gentleman came up to the car and started crying when he saw the car and it turned out he was a ten-year-old who was sitting in the back of the car because his father was given the privilege to drive this car through the tunnel so they allowed the gentleman to sit in the back when they reenacted that so he got a chance to ride in it again well we have the hood open here in our dubinet uh zenia and it is a six cylinder about eight liter 160 horsepower single carburetor updraft this has a three-speed transmission and if you can look at the side you can again see on the side that the hispana sweeza logo is over there on the side of the engine which is a feature on most all these french cars we have opened both of the doors and i want to when we get a chance to show you that i want to show you how interesting these doors are this car actually won best in show at the windsor castle concours in england and it's won many other awards because of its uh beautiful restoration and its wonderful design and of course it is a 101 car so the doors on this uh actually come out and then move back to the rear on both sides really provides a lot of easy access to the car you might notice that the starter is actually down here between the seats next to the gearshift lever and of course it just has this cocoa mats on the floor and bamboo around the steering wheel the steering wheel if you notice also like most of the cars at the time hatchlings on it because as you were driving you had to adjust the advance and on the ignition the air fuel mixture and there's also a throttle and so it's a little bit like a speed control you push the pedal down to where you want it and then slide this little lever over and it could hold the accelerator down if you wanted to take your foot off the accelerator so again this is our 1938 hispana sweesa dubinae also known as the zenia what you see here is not only a winter batson show of pebble beach but it's also selected as the best of the best car at the quail two years ago so it is uh quite a highly regarded and probably considered to be the most valuable car in the world at least we think it's the most valuable car in the world it's a 1936 got a type 57sc also called the atlantique now the sc in this car stands for surbace a which means lowered chassis and the c stands for compressor now the first owner of this car was lord philip rochelle of england this was actually his college car he drove this car around cambridge when he was uh 18 and going to trinity college he originally bought the car without a supercharger and uh then after about a year so he sent it back to mulsheim and they put a supercharger on it it also had hydraulic brakes added to it this car has sold probably three times in his life for the most amount of money we think ever sold at a public auction uh when it originally sold we think this car cost the equivalent of about twelve thousand dollars now he don't think that's too much now but back then you could buy a nice house in st louis for about four thousand dollars so this was quite a very expensive car uh probably 250 000 french francs at the time uh it also then in 1971 a uh a doctor who had done some time during the war in england and got kind of fascinated with bugatti cars and french cars purchased this car and he paid in 1971 he paid about 59 000 for this car well again you don't think that's too much today but it was the most amount of money ever paid for a car at a public auction at the time now i happen to own a 1966 corvette and when it was brand new it cost six thousand dollars a chrysler bearing convertible cost nineteen hundred dollars so my little corvette was three times the price of that car and just think of how much a car 59 thousand dollars would be so then this car went on to win best in show of pebble beach and mr mullen was able to uh to buy the car and we have it here in our collection i'm so happy it's here because it's such a popular car travels all over the world and many times it's not here so it's just such a pleasure to have it back now one of the features you have to notice on this car are the rivets and the fins on the fenders the original car was supposed to be made out of a magnesium body and at the time you could not weld magnesium so the way to hold these big large body panels together in fact the whole car was to have these tabs with the rivets now there are four of these cars that were built this was the first one of the production cars if you want to call four cars of production this one as i said was originally bought by lord phillip rushchild there's only two of these cars left that we know of that are original conditioned cars the fourth one is owned by ralph lauren and it's black chassis number two for this car is also a black car and that car is missing we're not sure what happened to it but i would think if you ever go to any old barn you might want to keep your eye open we don't know if it was destroyed during the war we don't know it was buried because a lot of bugattis were buried and hidden away during the war chassis number three a gentleman owned that car and he uh he and his let his girlfriend drive the car and she stalled it out on the railroad tracks and they were hit by a train killing them both if we get a picture of the rear of this car you can see it has a split window in it and as for a guy like me who owns a corvette coupe that's a very important thing because this car inspired bill mitchell who was the designer of the mid-year corvettes to put a split window in the 1963 corvette it was a lot bigger than this and there was quite a controversy because the engineers or dendov did not like the split window because he said it was hard to see his racing competition out of the back window but they did do it for that one year and one year only you can also see the trunk back here is a circular piece again with the large fin there's a little lever that you put your fingers down here on a spring-loaded device and move it down to the little notch and then you have to lift the whole trunk lid out straight because with the fin it cannot hinge you can might also notice it has five tail pipes okay this is a has a type 50 engine in it which is a eight cylinder with double overhead cams you can also see down here the supercharger and this little device is the back a fire device so if the supercharger and the engine backfire it comes blows out there and there is a grill here so it doesn't blow the grill off the front of the car you might see in all of our race cars they have a little hole in the side for that very purpose so you can see our beautiful what we refer to as suicide doors uh big opening area to get in and out not the easiest car to get in and out of but the the roof is curved up at the top uh same way that my corvette is actually interesting there's a little extra room up here so you can get in without banging your head too much the seats in the car are what you would find in all the bugatti type cars they were pretty straightforward and simple and a lot of times they were just a seat that came with the chassis and as people would build the bodies and the interiors they would put different kinds of seats into them but a lot of people said no wait a tory bugatti or zombie gotti designed those seats i'm not getting rid of them so you can see uh if you look at the dash of beautiful wood dash this actually is your traffic haters down here the traffic heaters are on a timer so when you turn the switch the traffic hater pops out and then it's like a kitchen timer it ticks back down and when it's done the traffic cater moves back in to the body panel there is a little storage area back here in the back there is not the normal luggage you might see here but there is a little bit of a storage area the two long levers sticking out from the side down there are your advanced and you usually retire down when you're starting the car and then you adjust it back up and so you have the the throttle and the advanced there that you can use on the dash this car actually has two motors on the windshield wiper some of the other cars have the one motor with the two windshield wiper blades connected by a rod but with the seam here and the fin you cannot do that here you can see on the door if you look on that side you can see there's a little air vent in the side that you can open and close to to put air into the side of the car and there's actually a little hole in the back in case you get any water in there the water drips out the most gorgeous car in the world as far as i'm concerned one probably the most valuable car in the world and of course we think it's the queen of our show but we happen to be a kingdom with lots of queens well we've seen a lot of beautiful totally restored cars and now we want to show you some cars in a completely original condition these are all cars out of the schlump reserve collection which mr mullen purchased many years ago he bought a total of about 65 cars he's and he's kept about 35 of the ones that he likes the best there's five that we show here right now or six i should say but there's five that are bugattis so we have three type 40s that we have here and then we have those are basically a tory bugatti design cars and then we have three cars that were designed by jean bugatti john bugatti liked to name his cars after either greek goddesses or mountain passes so the two cars here you see with the large slanted windshields are called there too and there too is a mountain pass in uh in france the one in the middle which is an interesting car it's actually a four-door car that looks like a two-door car it's called a gabriele and gabriel is a tallest mountain pass in france and this is interesting because there's really no b-pillar here you just have the frames for the front and the rear door the rear door opens like a suicide door and the front door opens like a regular door now these all come from the shrimp collection and it's quite an interesting story but the arlet schlump was able to inherit what was called the reserve collection from her husband and after she died this collection of 65 cars was put up for sale and the way they decided to sell these cars is to sell all 65 cars at once and so they actually called mr mullen and said we hear you might have an interest in some of the cars in the swamp collection but we've decided to sell them all at once so if you want to buy and be involved in this you need to buy all 65 cars this is the price non-negotiable and you have 48 hours to make up your mind fortunately mr mullen i believe was in scotland at the time was able to quickly fly over to france where he looked at these cars and he was able to make the deal to buy all 65 cars if you look on the wall behind here you will see a enlarged photograph actually of where these cars were being stored at the time that he purchased them and unfortunately while they were there people would break into the the storage area they would damage the cars they stole all the bugatti logos they would take the steering column wheels they would take the rear tires the spare tires they actually took the radiator off one of these cars and so they were kind of pretty much damaged and destroyed and vandalized so mr mullen bought them and he decided you know cars are only original once you can restore a car plan 20 30 times if you like but they're only original once and so the goal here is to keep these cars as they were found so that my grandchildren and great grandchildren can come to this museum and see these cars in their total original condition the last car i want to show you here uh is really important you notice i kind of stand away from a little bit because this was thought to be john bugatti's personal car it's a 1931 type 40. and uh we don't like to get too close to this car and it is as i said in original condition well we hope that you'll be able to come after we get all this virus thing taken care of that you can come to our museum and see us in person we'd love to have you here uh we are going to probably be after the the opening is loud we'll probably open three or four days a week so we'll have many more options for you to come hopefully you'll be able to do that we really love having you here and it's always great to greet the people that come from locally all around the world thank you so much and i hope you enjoyed this brief little look at the mullen automotive museum's gems

Channel: Petersen Automotive Museum

Views: 412,055

Rating: 4.910244 out of 5

Keywords: bugatti, car collection, bugatti chiron, bugatti divo, bugatti veyron, bugatti la voiture noire, bugatti chiron 300 mph, bugatti chiron super sport, car collection uk, car collection shmee, car collection stradman, car collectors garage, car collectors dream home, car collector home, car collection toys, car collection tour, car tour

Id: yGMUwdvUPtQ

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020