(Bloomberg) -- An 86-year-old Italian race car owned over the years by a string of dignitaries from Egypt to Switzerland to Florida—only to be stolen outside a Holiday Inn Express in the American South—will be for sale during Monterey Car Week in Carmel, California.
On Aug. 16, Gooding & Co. will offer the 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 Lungo Spider filched in 2022 and recovered in 2023. The car has a presale estimate of $16 million to $20 million. If the 8C is anything like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or Pablo Picasso’s Femme Assise, the hijinks behind its triumphant return could make it even more alluring than expected. Each of those precious artworks has been lost and recovered in heists that only increased their mystique—and their value.
“I am not aware of any of these 8C 2900 Alfa Romeos having been stolen and recovered like that,” says Simon Moore, who wrote a book on the model, The Immortal 2.9. “It certainly adds something to the story about this particular car.” But will that storyline raise the price at the auction podium? It’ll have to buck the current classic car market, which has been softening for the past couple of years, to do so.
An Inadvertent Crime
The drama has undoubtedly enhanced the notoriety of the 8C model line, already well-known among the world’s wealthiest and most discerning collectors as a holy grail car. It’s so special because it is exceedingly rare; of an estimated 40 ever built, only five remain in their original form. It also has a proven track record of winning the world’s most prestigious concours events. Someone who buys one today typically does so in order to go for the top title at a hallowed event such as the Villa d’Este Concours d’Elegance and the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
In 2019, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s former Alfa Romeo 8C won the Gran Turismo Trophy at Pebble Beach. (He had sold it years earlier to avoid prison for tax avoidance.) “The 8C was one of the best cars made in the late twenties and early thirties,” Mason wrote about his 8C in an essay for Hagerty Inc. last year. “It was a remarkably sophisticated sports car, an early version of the [Ferrari 250] GTO, and really easy to drive; my dad’s Bentley in comparison is such a heavy thing but you can put both into fourth gear and go all day.”
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Quite advanced for its era, the 8C also introduced technologies including a four-wheel independent suspension, massive hydraulic brakes with finned-aluminum drums, and a light alloy construction. It earned legendary status for winning the most harrowing and glorious car races of the 1930s, like the Mille Miglia for Enzo Ferrari’s Scuderia Ferrari and the 24 Hours of Spa. The 2900’s roaring 2.9-liter straight-eight engine with twin superchargers and overhead camshafts—another advanced technology for the time—produced up to 225 horsepower, gobs more than other cars at the time made by the likes of Ford, Fiat and even Mercedes-Benz.
“Prewar Alphas were so far ahead of everybody else—everybody else was like a Model T compared to that car—that’s why they won everything,” says Mike Regalia, who completed 500 hours of work on the vehicle after it was recovered. Regalia, who is based in Sun Valley, California, is a well-regarded restorer of Talbot-Lagos and other elite European models, as well as cars with serious provenance such as Steve McQueen’s 1963 Ferrari 250 GT/L Lusso Berlinetta and 1976 Porsche 930 Turbo.
When it was stolen on July 25, 2022, in Latta, South Carolina, this 8C (Chassis 412027) was on its way to a restoration shop in Maine. At the time it was owned by a prominent dentist and businessman named Richard Workman. The founder of Heartland Dental, Workman has owned many rare classics, including a 1961 Ferrari 400 Superamerica and 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, which have won recognition for his collection out of Windermere, Florida. Workman had bought the car privately from the Oscar Davis collection in 2022.
The 8C was being towed in a covered trailer by a 2002 Ford F-350 pickup when the transporter parked it overnight outside a Holiday Inn Express near Interstate 95. It’s unclear why a vehicle of such high value was transported with such low security, though it’s not uncommon. In fact, detectives working the case said at the time, the thieves apparently hadn’t meant to take the Alfa at all. Their target was the truck, one in a string of similar heists targeting modern vehicles in lonely lots.
After the theft was reported, AIG Property Casualty Company paid the $23 million insurance claim on the vehicle and retained its title, which it still holds. Then, in December, after months of concerted effort, a team of FBI and insurance agents found the missing 8C in a warehouse in North Carolina. A detective at the Dillon County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the matter or the arrests of two men in conjunction with the case, or to say whether a much-publicized $50,000 reward had been collected. AIG’s spokesperson declined to make anyone available to comment.
A Lost Icon
The car has existed in various states of documented repair, with owners including Major Raymond Flower of Cairo (who bought it in 1945); Dr. Max Mühlethaler of Bern, Switzerland (1953); and Ben Paul Moser of Santa Barbara, California (the late 1970s). The identity of its first owner, however, is lost to history. David Gooding, the president and co-founder of Gooding & Co., said in an email that there was an original Roman registration for the car, but it’s not housed with the Italian registration files accessible to the public.
“The original owner of the car may have been an ambassador to Egypt at the time, and this would certainly explain why the car ended up in Cairo, and why its registration purportedly exists with other archival material related to diplomats in the Italian archives,” he said. “This hypothesis is supported by the first known owner of the car, Major Raymond Flower, who recalls picking the Alfa Romeo up from a diplomatic office upon his purchase in 1945.”
In 1998, after a complete restoration that took the paint down to bare metal, the 8C joined the Oscar Davis collection in New Jersey and won First in Class at the 2000 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Then Richard Workman, the Florida collector, bought it.
The car is painted a dark blue—as in its earliest known color scheme—but its formerly red interior is now light tan. “My job was to repair and refinish—and do the repair in a way that really just does not stand out on the car, that all blends in with what the car was,” Regalia says. “Beyond that, I went over every single square inch of that car with polishers and brought the luster and the gloss back up, and it came back amazingly.”
While the extent of restoration scheduled before the theft remains unclear, the car sustained only cosmetic damage during the incident, according to those close to the matter. “If somebody was going to restore the car, they were doing it because they were choosing to do it, not because it necessarily needed it,” Regalia says. “The rest of the car was really nice, and the thing runs fantastic.”
“The minor damage has no effect on this car’s value,” Gooding said.
The Sale of the Year
Experts involved in ultra-high-end collector cars say the current estimate for the car—$3 million less than what it was insured for at the time of the theft—reflects the current vintage market, which has softened since reaching record highs in 2022. “The market has shown over the last handful of big Alfa sales that prices have corrected downward,” says Stephen Serio, a prominent automotive broker who deals in blue-chip cars.
Possibly no amount of rediscovery excitement will bolster the 8C’s price. It’s rare that any of the significant prewar Alpha Romeos go on sale in public at all; this one never has, and it faces an uphill battle against slowed momentum in the segment, even as similar models command $20 million-plus sums in private sales.
Last year in Monterey a 1933 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Cabriolet by Figoni with a low estimate of $3 million went unsold at RM Sotheby’s, even after a million-dollar price reduction after it didn’t sell in 2022; meanwhile, a 1937 Alfa Romeo 6C 2300B took just $850,000 at the Gooding auction, well under its $1.25 million low estimate. At the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance in 2023, Broad Arrow sold a 1932 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport Roadster for $1.15 million before premiums, missing its $1.5 million low estimate, while RM Sotheby’s 1931 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Grand Sport Spider went unsold against a $2 million low estimate.
Gooding has a more optimistic outlook. He was able to sell a 1933 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Cabriolet last year in Monterey, an earlier version with a smaller engine, for $4.5 million including buyers premiums, well within its estimated value of $4 million to $5 million. (The same car had sold for $4.18 million including premiums at Gooding’s Pebble Beach auction in 2009.)
“No, the market is certainly not down,” Gooding says, noting that when the buyer’s premium is included with the estimated high value of the stolen 8C, the price nears what the car was insured for. The car is an exceptional example with attributes that could result in a higher figure at auction than other examples that have recently come to market, he says: “We have priced it attractively and conservatively.”
Posted to Lot 29, the Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 Lungo Spider will be shown in a public preview starting Aug. 14 at the Gooding & Co. auction at the Parc du Concours on Portola Road in the hamlet of Pebble Beach.
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