AMONG serious collectors, there are few mysteries; with only occasional exceptions, cars of particular significance have all been deeply researched and their histories well-documented. A Duesenberg or Ferrari expert knows when an important example will be coming to auction and can typically recite its ownership history in numbing detail, referring to the car not by something as vague as a model name but by its exact chassis number.
That is why the grapevine of the collector market buzzes when a rare car re-emerges after being out of sight for many years. Such is the case — and the source of anticipation — surrounding the French grand touring car from 1938, a Bugatti Type 57C Atalante coupé. One of about 40 built, the Atalante is the last design of a talented young man before his early death, and one of the most daring shapes of its time.
Adding to its mystique, the car, owned by a member of one of New York’s most prominent families, had not seen the light of day since 1962, when it was last registered for the road. The Atalante has not moved from its garage space — it is now sandwiched between a old Farmall tractor and a 1949 Jaguar Mark V sedan — in a New York City suburb since then. It will be auctioned on June 3 by Christie’s at the Greenwich Concours d’Élégance, at Roger Sherman Baldwin Park in Greenwich, Conn. Christie’s estimates that the car will sell for $300,000 to $400,000.
While noncollectors might be shocked by that price for a car in this state of neglect, its as-found condition adds charm for many would-be Bugatti owners. Many vintage cars, even from the grandest marques, have suffered untold indignities, but this Atalante is remarkably original — with little more than small repairs at the rear and the addition of bumpers — and it has never sustained the harm of a botched restoration.
Its value is related to Bugatti’s status as one of the most revered names in automotive history, memorable enough for the Volkswagen Group to revive the brand in recent years for a series of ultraexpensive sports cars.
The founder of the company, Ettore Bugatti, built his first car in 1899 and gave them his name in 1910, when he established his company in the Alsace region, then under German control. Bugatti soon became known for superbly engineered racecars, one of which won the first Monaco Grand Prix in 1929. To finance the racing, the company built powerful cars for wealthy enthusiasts, a business model later adopted by Enzo Ferrari.
Ettore’s son, Jean, grew up in the business and established himself as an imaginative and talented automotive engineer and designer. Jean, who died in 1939 while testing a racecar, designed the bodies for the Type 57 models.
Of the 710 Type 57s built, about 40 carried the sleek two-door coupé body named Atalante, after the quick-footed young woman of Greek mythology who would not marry any man who could not outrun her.
The owner of this particular Bugatti is John Wendell Straus. Mr. Straus, 87, is a grandson of Isador Straus, who built R.H. Macy & Co. into a retail giant and who, with his wife, Ida, was among those lost on the Titanic in 1912.
John W. Straus has loved cars since childhood. His first, at the age of 14, was a Ford Model T that he kept for many years. As a student at Harvard, he spent much of his free time looking for old cars abandoned in fields near the Cambridge campus. He joined the military in 1942, where, as a pilot in the Army Air Force with a fluency in French, he trained Free French airmen in Alabama.
After the war he joined the family business; as a Macy’s vice president he was deeply involved in the Thanksgiving Day Parade and served as the store’s liaison to the production team of “Miracle on 34th Street” when it filmed in Manhattan.
Mr. Straus often found himself at Zumbach Motors on West 54th Street, one of the first foreign car repair shops in New York and a gathering place for show business personalities like Paul Whiteman and Dave Garroway. It was there one day in the early 1950s that Straus saw a rakish black and yellow Bugatti. It was not just the car’s looks that convinced him he had to own it, but also the obvious care and craftsmanship that went into its construction.
The car had originally left the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, then in France, with a convertible body and the optional supercharged engine. An early owner of this car also owned an Atalante coupé; the coupé originally came with the less powerful version of the Type 57 engine, a 135-horsepower in-line eight cylinder.
In the late 1940s the body of the convertible was swapped with that of the coupé, mating the 160-horsepower engine with the rarer coupé body. Such exchanges were not uncommon at the time, with some well-to-do owners regularly changing the body style of their car seasonally to suit their moods.
The Bugatti joined other cars in Mr. Straus’s garage, which over the years included a Rolls-Royce Phantom I, several Jaguars, a late-1930s Mercedes-Benz 540K, his original Ford Model T and a Duesenberg that had been purchased new by his father. They all saw service driving his family between New York City and their country homes in Westchester County.
Mr. Straus became involved in education and the arts during the ’60s and left Macy’s in 1968 to begin a second career in education. He later became an consultant serving on the boards of many arts organizations. All this activity left little time for his cars and one by one they were parked, not to be driven again.
It is exactly this sort of unrestored car that has helped the Christie’s auction at the annual Greenwich concours make something of a name for itself.
“In selling a ‘barn find’ car, we find that you have to market it correctly,” said Christopher Sanger, vice president in charge of sales for Christie’s motor car department in the United States. “A picture’s worth a thousand words — you need the right images to create the proper mood, by showing the car as discovered so people can appreciate how undisturbed it is.”
Finding cars like this is also a part of the competition between auction houses. “We’re all striving to find fresh-to-the-market cars — important and rare cars that have been tucked away in collections and lost to time,” Mr. Sanger said.
Restoring a car purchased in original condition like this requires special care. Alex Finigan, sales manager of Paul Russell & Company in Essex, Mass., a shop that regularly works for top collectors, said that the work should start with documentation. “The process is that we photograph literally every nut and bolt. Although we’ve worked on many Bugattis, they’re all different.
“We study any period factory photos as well,” he said. “This is all before a wrench touches the car. It’s very important to identify what is original and what may have been added later.”
Restoration on a car like the Bugatti can take up to 6,000 hours of labor and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2006, a restored Atalante sold at the Gooding auction at Pebble Beach for $682,000.
For the person who buys this Bugatti, it will be akin to the thrill of an archaeologist at a dig site, combined with that of the museum curator who finally puts the object on display. It’s like unearthing a lost treasure, then bringing it out into the light of the world to be celebrated once again. By any measure of desirability, it’s worth the effort.
The Greenwich Concours d’Élégance will take place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, June 2-3, at Roger Sherman Baldwin Park in Greenwich, Conn.
