Nel Bugatti, dipinto di blu

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Have you ever come across the sweet voice and melodic piano-playing of Leo di San Felice? We have to admit that we hadn’t, but we immediately took notice when the Italian composer was brought to our attention. We first came across Leo looking very relaxed, striking a confident pose in delightful late 1960s dress, leaning casually on the wing of a Bugatti on the cover of a record sleeve. Oddly, this was an EP published to promote that year’s London to Sydney Marathon – not a rally for vintage cars, so the reasoning behind that is a bit of a mystery by itself. It gets more peculiar, though, when you see Leo’s car is a Dutch-registered rarity.

The blue beauty is a 1926 Bugatti Type 44 from the Collection Sauerbier Rotterdam, or so the EP’s back cover tells us. Searching for the registration number GK-84-83 reveals a few more pictures of the same car, although it is now described as a 1928 car, not 1926, with torpedo bodywork by Vanvooren of Courbevoie, Paris. The French coachbuilder clothed quite a number of Bugattis, mostly  Type 57s, ranging from the plain and simple to the outrageously extravagant, but this dual-cowl torpedo may well have been unique.

The photographs that can be found so easily on the worldwide web all date back to the 1960s, too, with one of them shot on the circuit of Zandvoort during a rally organized by the Pioneer Automobile Club of Holland in October 1963. It seems safe to say the car was owned then by Bugatti enthusiast Sauerbier. Still, two questions remain: does it survive, with or without its torpedo body, and how on earth did our Leo get involved with it?

Words: Jeroen Booij; pictures: archive, Spaarnestad Collection and Flickr
 

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