Article in Feb. 2012 "Town & Country" magazine

[JasonP]

There is a very interesting article in February's "Town & Country" about a junk-yard in Los Angeles, California, dickishly holding million-dollar cars and letting them rot. Mercedes even offered to restore it and put it up in their museum, but the owners said "No."

I have the mag, and read the article, but they don't put their articles online. Here is a good write-up.....

http://www.autoblog.com/2012/01/22/one-off-mercedes-550k-barn-find-discovered-in-south-central-la/

Being agriculturally inclined to build barns in the country, we don't expect barn finds to turn up in the middle of a high-turnover metropolis. Yet that's been happening more regularly of late, and writer Michael Mraz has found another example in South Central, Los Angeles: a one-of-one Mercedes-Benz 1935 Caracciola 500K built especially for Silver Arrows race driver Rudolph Caraccioloa. It is pictured above in better days, after having been restored and displayed on the lawn at the Pebble Beach concours in the late 1970s.

What's amazing about the Caracciola 500K, and tragic for car lovers, is that it has a good deal of company: in a piece called "Wheels of Fortune" in the February issue of Town & Country magazine, Mraz found scaffolds full of vintage metal in awful condition, rusting outside in a parts yard called Porche Foreign Auto. They include:

    ...a pair of one-off prewar Maybachs; one of two Iso Grifo Spyders (designed and engineered by Giotto Bizzarrini, who also has the Ferrari 250 GTO on his résumé); one of 29 alloy-bodied Mercedes Gullwings...; a couple of BMW 502s and 507s; a half-dozen or so Lamborghini Miuras, with their mighty V12 engines; and the last surviving example of the seven Horch 855 Spezial Roadsters ever built, a specimen once owned by Eva Braun that was for a time on loan to the Audi Museum in Germany. (Audi was founded by August Horch.) Parked one on top of the other are dozens upon dozens of Porsche Carrera carcasses....

Porche Foreign Auto was started in 1967 by a German butcher named Rudi Klein, who bought the Caracciola 500K after it was shown at Pebble in 1978. He took it to a Mercedes show in Newport Beach in 1980, and when it wouldn't start he loaded it on a trailer and took it home. It hasn't been seen since, outside of the parts yard.

Klein passed away, and his salvage yard is overseen by his sons, who won't let any gawkers into to view the cars. Even Mraz was denied entry. But he spoke to folks who have seen the collection, and one said that there are vehicles people have sought for decades and thought had been destroyed. The head of the Mercedes Classic Center in Irvine believes the Caracciola 500K could be worth more than the 1937 540K Spezial Roadster that was auctioned for nearly $10 million at last year's RM Auctions at Pebble. But we might never know.

Town & Country doesn't have a proper website, so pick up the magazine to read the piece and see what the automotive world is missing. There's a sample of it in the attached gallery, but be warned, it's not pleasant to see.

[TJ 450]

That is ridiculous. You would think that the owners of the yard would have more sense of what they had, and sold off the desirable cars instead of letting them rot even further.

Tim

[Big_Richard]

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[Squiggle Dog]

That reminds me of seeing a youtube video where they are crushing Mercedes after Mercedes... most of them decent and complete-looking W116s, fintails, and pontons, occasionally with nice Euro lights.

[Casey]

That reminds me of seeing a youtube video where they are crushing Mercedes after Mercedes... most of them decent and complete-looking W116s, fintails, and pontons, occasionally with nice Euro lights.

My local yard had a W116, a W115, a W123 coupe, a couple W123 sedans, a W124, and probably 5 or 6 W126's, all with plenty of useful parts left, some of which I'd hoped to return for later because I didn't have the money or they were a lot of work to get.  Or I didn't really need them but knew I could make money from them so they were lower on the priority list.  Last time I went for a visit I found that all but a single W126 300SD had been crushed.  What's the point of that?  They've got 50,000 Fords and Chevys and Japanese imports, but decided to eliminate all their Mercedes in a single week.  That wouldn't be so bad if they had some fresh replacements, but they don't.

[Big_Richard]

.

[Casey]

if no ones buying the parts they get crushed and sold for their scrap weight value.

They don't have any accounting whatsoever...they don't keep an inventory.  At that time I had been buying various W116 and W123 bits every single weekend for some time, and I wasn't the only one.

[JasonP]

I don't know how one can be sentimental for garbage. If the father didn't respect it, why would the kids? But maybe I'm wrong ....

I don't think of the word sentimentality so much as reverence. Of course I have stronger feelings about rotting MBs than most, and I understand that difference. But when it comes to vehicles that are part of history, when major institutions want them for their museums, it's something else. I think there are a class of people in the world today who have no reverence for the past, or civilization itself. Call them Marxists, if you will. They could give two poops if one of the most amazing artefacts of art and engineering rusted away in an empty lot. I don't understand that mentality. If I had an old Samovar, or a Chinese tapestry, that others told me was a major achievement in art and engineering, I would respect it. I might not sell it, I might not even like it aesthetically, but I wouldn't let it rot in my basement. I would respect it, for the humanity and love that went into it.

Most of what we have today is trash. Corporations have been instructed - and are doing so - to sell trash. It is cost-effective to have your products be cheap and unreliable. It locks in the customer. That is why everything we buy nowadays is sh*te. And I think that is why places like W116.org exist - because there are those of us out there who do not want to spend our lives surrounded by garbage and trash. We respect good engineering, craftsmanship, skill, art, beauty. And we're willing to sacrifice for it. We see a value beyond money.

That's my rant for today.