Dust off your wallet, because RM Sotheby’s auction this October will see some freshly unearthed classics in shocking condition, including Lamborghini Miuras, Porsche 356s, and a legendary ex-Caracciola 1935 Mercedes-Benz 500K.
Kegun Morkin ©2024 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s|RM Auctions
In the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we see the Ark of the Covenant packed away in a crate and pushed into the depths of a vast warehouse, hidden away forever. What other treasures are tucked away in anonymity? We may never now. What we are about to discover, however, is what happens when the automotive version of that warehouse gets cracked open to public view for the first time.
Robin Adams ©2024 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s|RM Auctions
Coming to auction this October, through the RM Sotheby’s auction house, is a hoard of rarities that have been amassed and hidden away for decades. Kept behind barbed wire and steel fencing, partly in the open and partly in corrugated steel sheds, is a jaw-dropping collection of faded relics. Multiple Lamborghini Miuras. Dozens of Porsche 356s, stacked up like so many Honda Civics. Maseratis and Aston Martins, in various states of disrepair.
And this isn’t even the really rare stuff. The whispered-of one-offs and prototypes, not all yet confirmed, include prewar Maybachs, an Iso Grifo Spyder, and one of the only 29 alloy-bodied 300SL Gullwings, a car thought lost forever. A hint at the caliber of machinery here to be discovered came several years ago, when the last surviving Horch 855 Speziale Roadster left the yard to be restored by Audi at the company’s own expense and displayed at its museum.
But we do know of one car coming to auction that’s the car equivalent of the lost Ark. It’s a 1935 Mercedes-Benz 500K, a one-of-one two-seater built especially for the Silver Arrows Grand Prix racing legend Rudolf Caracciola. For almost 45 years, this car has been known to be kept hidden away from prying eyes. Even an ordinary 500K of this era would be worth multiple millions, and this one’s provenance puts it head and shoulders above the rest. How it came to be moldering away in a South Central Los Angeles scrapyard is a strange tale of eccentricity and secrecy.
RM has the auction listed as the The Junkyard: The Rudi Klein Collection. Truth be told, it is far more the latter than the former, a host of project cars that are far gone, but so valuable as to be worth resurrecting. Restoration shops all over are about to have more work than they can possibly take on.
Klein died in 2001, and he was not known to suffer fools gladly. In fact, he was said to set the dog on you should you show up to the scrapyard uninvited. Originally born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1950s, and after a series of jobs, including working as a butcher, he set up a scrap trade dealing with mostly European sports cars.
Kegun Morkin ©2024 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s
Piece by Piece
Consider the Mercedes-Benz 300SL. Now long recognized as a blue-chip collectible, in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was not particularly valuable. If one got wrecked and sold for scrap, then off it went. Fast-forward to rising classic values, and suddenly selling rare parts off that 300SL becomes a lucrative business.
Now repeat the phenomenon for old Porsches, Ferraris, Jaguars, and so on. Klein demanded top dollar for his parts, but his was the only scrapyard that might have what you need. He called the place Porche Foreign Auto, the misspelling deliberate after Porsche threatened legal action.
Sometime toward the end of the 1970s, Klein found himself flush with enough cash to buy something exceptional. The Caracciola 500K had just won its class at Pebble Beach in 1978, and he bought it for an unspecified amount of money. At a Mercedes club show in Newport Beach in 1980, the engine refused to turn over, and Klein packed it up and took it home. No one ever saw it again, until now.
Well, not quite no one. The whereabouts of the 500K were an open secret for years: Everyone knew where the car was, even though few had actually been granted access to see it. It was far too important a machine to be forgotten about, even though it was shielded from the public eye.
The direct connection to Caracciola makes this example the holy grail for the marque. To this day, his six wins at the German Grand Prix is an unbeaten record, and in 1938, he took the W125 Rekordwagen to a top speed of 268.9 mph, making a Mercedes-Benz the fastest car in the world. The feats of the Silver Arrows are of course tainted by association with the Nazis, who funded the teams and used them as propaganda, but Caracciola’s bravery and skill were nearly unmatched.
This two-seat 1935 500K was built to accommodate his height, and having a Grand Prix winner driving around town in it was essentially a rolling billboard for Mercedes-Benz. It was eventually replaced, and it turned up in a showroom in Paris in 1939, where it was promptly snapped up by dictator Benito Mussolini as a present for his son-in-law. Later, when this son-in-law rebelled along with others, Mussolini had him shot.
Kegun Morkin ©2024 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s
The car survived, hidden in Ethiopia, which had been invaded by Italy in the mid-’30s. Postwar, it was bought and shipped to California, where it changed hands several times. It was restored and shown at Pebble Beach in 1966, finishing second in class. Unchanged, it would win best in class a dozen years later.
Though he let the car languish, Klein is said to have always carried a photo of the 500K in his wallet. Those who met him describe a cranky and unusual character. His two sons, Ben and Jason, kept the Porche business going, but also kept the public at bay. Around the same time that Klein Senior died, Mercedes-Benz offered to restore the 500K and show it at the company’s museum in Germany, as had been done with the Horch and Audi. It never happened.
But at last, after decades of wondering what might happen to one of the most significant Mercedes-Benz cars ever built, the Caracciola 500K is going to have its chance to shine again. As Indiana Jones might say, it belongs in a museum.
RM Sotheby’s plans to release a full list of the Klein collection in September, with the auction set for October. Finding out what’s on that list is going to be the final reveal of a tantalizing mystery. If something like the Caracciola 500K was hidden there, what else may be revealed?
