Wednesday, 26 April 2017

As Tears Go By: 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C SS Goes Up for Auction

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Talbot-Lago T150C SS

The half-decade preceding Hitler’s invasion of France gave rise to some of the most majestic interpretations of the automobile in the device’s then half-century of existence. Although Citroën had aimed for the upper end of the mass market with its 1934 Traction Avant, featuring unibody construction, at the high end of the market the action was squarely in the body-on-frame, specialized-coachwork realm. Firms such as Touring were doing admittedly wonderful work in Italy, but the French were working at another level entirely. Put simply, they were busy creating some of the most striking automobiles the world had ever seen. Voisin’s magnificent C28 Aérosport bowed in late 1935, mere months before Bugatti’s radical, riveted Type 57SC Atlantic Coupe of 1936. But there’s an argument to be made that, for unadulterated elegance, both cars were bettered a mere year after they arrived—by none other than the Talbot-Lago T150-C SS bodied by Figoni et Falaschi.

Talbot-Lago T150C SS

An evolution of Talbot-Lago’s T120, the T150-C featured a short-wheelbase chassis and a hot overhead-valve engine. Tony Lago, who’d taken control of the former Darracq works in Suresnes, outside Paris, had gone to London to license the Wilson preselector transmission and a suspension design from Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq, from which his own company had grown. Oddly enough, in 1958 Lago sold his company to Henri Pigozzi of Simca, which, in 1970, officially became part of Chrysler Europe alongside the former Rootes Group, which had previously hoovered up the Sunbeam and Talbot brands. Ashes to ashes, Bowie sang, all done up in his Pierrot finery.

Future machinations of the cross-Channel auto industry aside, the technology Lago brought back to Suresnes made for an effective, if not worldbeating, racing car. In 1938, a showroom-stock example placed third at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In that summer before the German invasion of Poland put the world’s most famous endurance race on hiatus for a decade, none other than Luigi Chinetti—future American Ferrari importer and founder of the beloved North American Racing Team—entered a competition-prepped T150-C SS. Chinetti’s car managed 81 laps of the Circuit de la Sarthe before opting for a dirt nap, which was good for 27th place. By 1949, when the race resumed, Talbot-Lago was a shadow of its prewar self, a mere decade away from its demise.

Talbot-Lago T150C SS

So, yes, the T150-C SS was a good, possibly even great car for its day, taken purely on its mechanical merits. But what put it over the top was the teardrop bodywork by Figoni et Falaschi. They’d effectively applied the design language to Delahayes prior to their work on the Talbot, but the Delahayes were huge, imposing pontoon boats, nearly cartoonish in appearance. The T150-C SS was something else entirely. A Gallic rebuke to the recently introduced Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahn-Kurier, the Talbot scoffed at the Benz’s very literal name and its meager rear-only fender spats. Like the Delahayes that preceded it, the T150-C SS was available with spats on all four wheels. Figoni dispensed with the elegant brutality that tended to characterize Bugatti and Voisin vehicles of the era and aimed for pure, unadulterated beauty. The “Goutte d’Eau” (Drop of Water, or Teardrop), as it was known, wore nary a hard edge save for the crease bisecting the windshield.

This particular car, chassis number 90110, was delivered in 1937. Hidden during the war, it resurfaced afterward in Switzerland in the care of an H. Frey, of Wengen. We like to imagine H. Frey was warmly welcomed by Monsieur Gustave during his prewar visits to the Republic of Żubrówka. In any event, H. Frey had the car rebodied by Hermann Graber of Wichtrach, Switzerland, as an open car. In 1966, he sold the automobile to a G. Frey of Zurich. This was presumably not the same G. Frey who performed “The Heat Is On,” a hit song featured in the 1984 Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop.



Three years after the release of Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy starred in Beverly Hills Cop II, which featured no compositions performed by G. Frey, late of the Eagles. Oddly enough, G. Frey of Zurich chose 1987 to sell his T150-C SS to its current owner, who then commissioned Auto Classique Touraine of Tours, France, to restore the Talbot-Lago to its original form, including the front fender’s spats. It was one of only two examples of T150-C SS to wear them.

Up for auction next month at the RM Sotheby’s Villa Erba event, this 4.0-liter, triple-carb, hemi-straight-six-powered coupe is sure to bring serious coin. The auction house suggests bidding will end somewhere between $3.5 and $4.5 million, which is more scratch than you’re bound to scrape together busking “The Heat Is On” in the bowels of the Paris Métro. Eddie Murphy, though? He’s probably got the money to buy it. Perhaps he should.

1937-Talbot-Lago-T150-C-SS-REEL

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