Doug Nye: Smashing records at the 50th Bonhams Goodwood sale

There’s a standing joke within the New Bond Street auction house that the head of the jewellery department can often carry the complete contents of any forthcoming Sale – every single darned Lot – safely enwrapped within his briefcase. Yet in contrast the specialists in the Car Department have the logistical headaches not only of transporting, erecting, tearing down and retrieving the entire Saleroom set for every “away-Sale” but they also have to organise safe transport of 80 or more sizeable motor cars, up to Speed Six Bentley size… and as plug ugly as the Bugatti Veyron – a design of supercar plainly struck by the ugly stick at birth, and what my late, great colleague and mentor Denis Jenkinson would surely have dismissed simply as being “a great gormless device”.

Jenks coined that phrase back in the late-1960s/early-1970s when confronted by a Maserati Bora – I think. Even he – at 5ft 3.5 inches tall – was hard-pressed to find suitable headroom in that machine, and while its road-going performance with its 4.9-litre V8 engine was pretty brutal, one also felt there was an evil gremlin lurking within its suspension design awaiting the first opportunity to catch out the driver, and fully explore his chance of surviving the ensuing – inevitably expensive – catastrophe.

I certainly developed a healthy distaste for so-called ‘supercars’ which I have maintained ever since.  This despite having worked with McLaren Cars for nine years through the McLaren F1 supercar sage, which I subsequently recorded in a very successful book, ‘Driving Ambition’. To me today – the F1 is the ONLY acceptable supercar.

Probably the first of the great supercars was the Lamborghini Miura – created by the engineering and development triumvirate of, Gian Paolo Dallara, Paolo Stanzani and Bob Wallace and launched in 1966.  The Miura certainly presented an entirely new shape and configuration to the world of high-performance cars, and put Ferrari squarely in its place with its conventional and suddenly dated-looking front-engined designs. The other way of looking at the Miura, however, was that it was an extremely expensive way of transporting only two people around the surface of the planet. I certainly couldn’t wrap my mind around there being any merit in a car incapable of carrying a sheet of 8ft x 4ft plywood, but perhaps I’m just a dullard who takes practicality and utility simply too far…

When Ferrari responded to the Miura and its descendants with the Boxer Berlinetta supercar design, things got even more weird, as the flat-12 engine was mounted way up in the air – confounding all race-bred conventions about mounting your most massive components and assemblies as low within the chassis as possible – in order to keep wheelbase within reasonable confines by mounting the transmission beneath the engine. When one studied the physics of the piece, it didn’t make much sense, and the BB design still leaves me deeply unconvinced and sceptical today.

Now in the 50^th Bonhams Goodwood Sale we offered some wonderful kit – along with some of the supercars which I neither understand – nor of which (as above) I really approve. I don’t see the point of 200mph motor cars when deploying even half of such potential performance upon the public road will surely result in loss of driving licence, if not of personal freedom. Where’s the sense in that, eh?

But there is plainly still a strong and ready market for such great gormless things.

Helped by the included modern-era supercars, the Bonhams 2018 FOS Sale realised no less than £32,046,159 – with several world records being broken in the process.

The best-selling Lot was the exquisite '2 VEV,' the ex-Jim Clark, ex-Essex Racing Stable, 1961 Aston Martin Zagato which sold on the telephone for a staggering £10,081,500 to a European enthusiast buyer.

Setting the world record for the most valuable BMW ever sold under the hammer at auction was the gorgeous, perfect-provenance, 1957 BMW 507 V8 Roadster which John Surtees owned from new, it having been given to him – well, on a 50:50 basis – by Count Domenico Agusta in return for his prowess in earning the MV-Agusta motorcycle brand its first 500cc World Championship title, in 1956.

This lovely – and rare – Beemer realised £3,809,500 against a Bonhams pre-Sale estimate of £2,000,000-2,500,000. After a tense and lengthy bidding exchange, the motor car sold in the room to another keen – and intensely determined – European buyer.

Classic racing cars were popular throughout the Sale, with the dual-use Grand Prix racing and road-going ex-Scuderia Ferrari/ex-Richard Shuttleworth 1932-34 Alfa Romeo Tipo B Grand Prix Monoposto selling for £4,593,500. Again the car has gone abroad but to a pure-bred racer and on who has a fabulous collection of wonderful cars for this 1935 Donington Grand Prix winner to join.

Newer models also performed very strongly, with the 2012 Bugatti Veyron Super Sport Coupé - that’s right, the matte-black slug whose attraction I will never ever understand – selling for an estimate-shattering £2,045,500 to a buyer present in the marquee.  Someone loves it - at least.

Backing up the success with ‘2 VEV’, Aston Martin was very much the day’s favoured marque, with the 1965 Aston Martin DB5 Sports Saloon that starred in the James Bond movie ‘GoldenEye' exceeding its £1,200,000-1,500,000 estimate to realise £1,961,500. The buyer was SPYSCAPE, the education and entertainment company focused on the world of espionage and secret intelligence.

In fact it was heartening to see British marques perform incredibly strongly throughout the Sale, with the 1931 Bentley 4.5-Litre Supercharged Tourer 'Blower' – 1 of the 50 originally built – selling for £2,017,500.

Other highlights included a 1960 Ferrari 250 GT Pininfarina Coupé selling for £583,900 – the Tulip Rally class winning,1954 AC Ace Roadster selling for £404,700 – and the 1977 Porsche 911S that starred in the recent Scandinavian TV serial ‘The Bridge’ achieving seven times its pre-Sale estimate, £141,500 – no less – with proceeds going to WaterAid to bring clean water supplies to the Third World. Splendid effort.

My longtime friend and colleague James Knight, Bonhams Motoring Chairman and the auctioneer for the Sale, told the press: “We are simply blown away by today's results. This is our 50th sale at Goodwood – which happens to coincide with the silver anniversary of The Festival of Speed – and it was the perfect celebration of classic and collectors' motor cars. The world records that we set today are indicative of the continued market desire for the historically significant motor cars with impeccable provenance such as '2 VEV' and the John Surtees BMW 507…”

Spot on mate – spot on.