Bugatti

Connecticut’s Lime Rock Park held its 36^th annual Historic Festival during the Labor Day weekend, running from August 30 through September 3, 2018. If you enjoy vintage racing, then Friday, Saturday, and Monday are your days to watch classic race cars battling it out around this historic track. By local ordinance, racing is not allowed on Sundays. The Festival organizers have taken advantage of that restriction by hosting their “Sunday In The Park” event, with hundreds of classic (and sometimes not-so-classic) cars arrayed along the entirety of track’s perimeter.

Each year there is a special featured marque, and for 2018, that marque was Bugatti. By my count, there were 70 of these famed French cars on display, a number that might be rivaled only by the former Schlumf Museum’s holdings. The strong turnout speaks to the high esteem with which Ettore’s cars are held. Many of the race cars appeared to be in original condition, while most of the road-going cars have been restored at some point. No matter, as Bugatti owners (like Bentley owners) are known to drive their cars rather than treat them like trailer queens.

While the Bugatti display bordered on overwhelming, there were plenty of other vehicles on the field to draw one’s attention. This show tends to attract primarily European cars, and the British, German, Italian, and Swedish turnout did not disappoint. A relatively new feature at Lime Rock is the so-called “Gathering of the Marques”. Open classes, sometimes labeled by Country of Origin and sometimes specified by make and model, are created, and owners are invited to park their vehicles on the track.

The Gathering of the Marques attracted particularly large volumes of BMWs (especially the 2002 model), Porsches (especially 911s), Mazda Miatas, plus the cars of Sweden, Great Britain, and Italy. (Where else but at Lime Rock would a fan of Italian cars such as myself see an Alfa 1900, Fiat Dino Coupe, and Lancia Stratos all on the same day?) A smaller but significant selection of domestic iron provided a nice contrast to the European cars.

The flea market area which used to exist near the start of the straightaway has all but disappeared, but a few vendors had interesting cars for sale, at what appeared to be reasonable prices. And let’s not forget that the paddocks are open to the public on Sunday, so race vehicles otherwise not on display can be ogled as part of the entertainment.

The threatened rain showers never materialized; in fact, the temps remained reasonable, staying in the high 70s/low 80s. Anything would have been better than last year’s deluge. It’s a three-hour one-way drive for me, but the quality and variety of offerings has drawn me back almost every Labor Day weekend for the past 25+ years. The track’s setting, nestled in a valley in the Berkshire Mountains, only adds to the ambience. The Lime Rock Fall Historic Festival is a must-see event on the calendar for auto enthusiasts in the Northeast.

Click on the photos to enable full-screen view!

BUGATTIS:

ITALIAN:

**1955 Alfa Romeo 1900 (for sale for $395,000)**

**Lancia Fulvia Zagato! Here’s looking at you, Lenny!**

**Lancia Appia four-door pillarless sedan**

**Fiat Dino Coupe, powered by Ferrari V6 Dino engine**

**Pre-war Alfa monoposto race car; note “SF” (Scuderia Ferrari) emblem**

GERMAN:

**Row of BMW 2002s poses with hoods up**

BRITISH:

**E-Type OTS stunning in gunmetal grey & red**

JAPANESE:

DOMESTIC:

**Lincoln Continental 4-door convertible**

**1955 Dodge, with original flathead-6**

VOLVOS:

**OK, Volvo experts, what’s not correct here?**

CARS FOR SALE:

**The goddess watches over the French collection**

In March of 1983, my girlfriend and I took a one-week vacation trip to visit her sister and brother-in-law in Germany. The BIL was in the armed services for the U.S., and was stationed in Frankfurt. They had a government-assigned apartment and a room to put us up while we toured the German countryside, happily eating and drinking our way through the week. Somehow, I managed to convince my girlfriend that we should use our rental car to make a slight detour to the small town of Mulhouse, France, a short trip across the border. There in Mulhouse was the French National Automobile Museum, also known as the Schlumpf Collection.

**Portrait of the car enthusiast as a young man**

I knew of the Schlumpf brothers and their Bugatti automobiles from numerous articles in the automotive press (especially those in Road & Track) published throughout the 1970s. For those unfamiliar with the long involved history of Ettore Bugatti, his racing and road cars, Hans and Fritz Schlumpf, their Bugatti obsession, and the brothers’ eventual downfall, further reading is recommended, as it is beyond the scope of this blog entry to cover these stories.

Most of their Bugattis were restored by the Schlumpfs — **The Schlumpfs restored most of their Bugattis**

If you think of Bugatti only as the builder of the 1,000 horsepower Veyron, their website has this wonderful history. A brief biography of Ettore Bugatti the man is summed up here by Wikipedia. The museum itself does a decent job reviewing its own history (although not every car is included) on its own website.

**The Parisian street lamp motif is especially noticeable here**

Back to our visit: we showed up on a weekday morning, and the museum was sparsely attended, although there were several busloads of French students milling about. The sheer number of cars was overwhelming, and the fact that the majority of them were Bugattis in a matching shade of French blue was even more overwhelming. Try as I might to capture them with my film camera, I only shot about two dozen pictures, which leads me to conclude that I had but one 24-exposure roll with me. As I had not documented specific model information for the vehicles I photographed, the museum’s website plus Google were used to research those details. The photo captions provide the year, make and model for all but a few of the cars below.

THE BUGATTIS

**1929 Bugatti Royale Coupe Type 41 (photos cannot convey the enormity of this thing)**

**1942 Bugatti Type 68 (micro Bugatti prototype)**

**Possibly a Type 57 with alternate coachwork**

**A Bugatti of unknown vintage; note the EB on headlight bar**

OTHER MAKES

Red cars (mostly of the Italian racing variety) are here too — **Red cars (mostly of the Italian racing variety)**

M-B 300 SLR — **Mercedes Benz 300 SLR racer**

**1951 Alfa Romeo Disco Volante (greatest car name ever: “Disco Volante” means “flying saucer”)**

The museum visit was a highlight, perhaps the highlight, of that week in Europe. What an honor to be able to say that I visited this tremendous collection in person. Reading the museum’s website, it is eye-opening to see that it has been changed, enlarged, and enhanced, as you might expect of any museum after so many years. It remains on my bucket list to make a return visit to what is now known as the “City of the Automobile – National Museum – Schlumpf Collection”.

richardscarblog

All automotive, all the time

Lime Rock Park Historic Festival, Sep. 2018