The beloved HEMI ‘Cuda convertible – a bargain at $3 million?

For most of us gearheads, we live, eat and breathe musclecars. We wake up wanting to check ours out and drive it, we go to bed missing it already. But being gearheads, many of us just love anything and everything automotive, and we can respect a cool car no matter who built it or what’s under the hood – just so long as it’s fast.

Sometimes, though, we are just astonished at how much someone would be willing to pay for a car. When we read the headlines about items that sell at auction, the cars have to be the ones that baffle us when someone spends a ton of money.

Even non-automotive items can sell for ridiculous amounts – there was a “Shoeless” Joe Jackson baseball bat that once sold at auction for about $577,610. That was a baseball bat, ladies and gentlemen. Ironically, that very same bat sat on a shelf for a decade or two before it was deemed worth a half-a-million bucks.

All six Coach Royales made it to Pebble Beach in 1985, making it the most expensive car show of the time.

Then there was the Bugatti Coach Royale that was the realized vision of Ettore Bugatti back in the 1920s that combined his idea of using half of their 16-cylinder aircraft engine to power the must luxurious car of the day. The 700 cubic engine powered the Type 41 Royale, a 7,000 pound car with a 15-foot wheelbase; and there were only six of these Coach Royales every produced. Imagine the sheer bliss of it all when all six Coach Royales, fully restored, were displayed at the Pebble Beach, California, Concours d’Elegance in 1985 for the first time ever, and quite possibly the last.

One of those rare gems was bought in a New York junkyard for about $400 by a former GM executive, Charles Chayne, before being restored, and when the cars displayed in ’85, each car had at least a $3,000,000 value. Not long ago, the value of one of those rare cars was valued at $10 million, making that rare HEMI ‘Cuda convertible seem like a real bargain.

Now that all of these numbers have been thrown around, numbers that most of us will only ever see in an article about someone else, imagine that the latest crazy price for an automobile made even that Coach Royale look like a bargain, because it sold at auction for nearly 30 million bucks!

That $30 million car was none other than Juan Manuel Fangio’s Mercedes-Benz W196 F1 racecar from the 1950s. Fangio won 9 of 12 races that it entered before it was retired and later restored. The W196 has a lot going for it: famous icon of an F1 driver, not a bad win ratio, and it’s a pretty cool part of racing history – even if it is from across the pond. But would you have ever guessed that a car would sell for $30 million?

Think of it this way: thirty million bucks is probably play money for the new owner, because you would have to have unlimited funds to buy a car for this much. He’s already lost money on this car – unless someone comes along and offers him a couple million more for it before the year is up.