The cars arrived at the Paris auction uncleaned, with some foliage still clinging to them, and were shown in darkened, eerily lit displays, according to Old Cars Weekly.
Roger Baillon, a French transportation entrepreneur, assembled the collection “from the 1950s into the ’70s,” Old Cars Weekly reported. He exhibited a roadster he built at the Paris Motor Show in the 1950s, per Sports Car Digest.
His plan was to open a museum. His business declined in the 1970s, and the cars “languished in makeshift, largely-open sheds,” Old Cars Weekly reported. Sports Car Digest says a business setback forced him to sell about 50 cars and that the rest stayed put.
The collection numbered 60 cars. Most were European classics of the 1930s and ’40s, with later Ferraris, a 1956 Maserati A6G and French makes such as Hotchkiss, Berliet, Ballot and Lorraine-Dietrich, per Old Cars Weekly.
Artcurial, the Paris auction house, announced the discovery in May 2014, according to Laughing Squid. Artcurial’s Pierre Novikoff told Motor Sport that he knew the Baillons’ accountant and that the family got in touch about a year later.
The sale took place on Feb. 6, 2015, at Artcurial in a hall next to the Rétromobile show in Paris, per Old Cars Weekly. The collection brought in about 25 million euros, more than half of Artcurial’s overall total of 46 million euros.
L’Argus put the Baillon total at 25.15 million euros for 59 cars, well above Artcurial’s high estimate of 15.7 million euros. Every car sold for two to ten times its estimate, the French outlet reported.
The star was a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider that once belonged to actor Alain Delon. It had been stored indoors, insulated with old magazines, and sold for 16.3 million euros, or $18.5 million, a world record, per Old Cars Weekly.
Smaller lots drew wild bidding. An Amilcar CGS estimated at 3,000 to 5,000 euros passed 30,000 euros “within 10 seconds,” Old Cars Weekly reported. A Voisin C3 sold for 85,000 euros against an estimate of 1,500 to 2,000, per L’Argus.
The French state used its pre-emption right to buy a Panhard & Levassor Dynamic coupe for 56,000 euros for the Compiègne automobile museum, L’Argus reported.
The collection even included a 1938 Packard Super Eight convertible coupe, which sold for $33,970. In Oklahoma, a Route 66 gas station-turned-Packard museum sold at auction for $72,000 in 2019.
Related: Detroit’s Packard Plant drew a $6 million top bid in 2013; after two buyers defaulted, it sold for $405,000
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