If you have a spare $15 million or so lying around the house, you might want to head over to Paris this February and look into spending it on one of the rarest and most sought-after racing cars on the planet: a 1939 model Auto Union Type D.

On February 17, Christie's will be auctioning one of only three remaining Type Ds at the City of Light's international vintage car fair, Retromobile, and estimates for what the speedster might fetch range from $12 to $15 million. And no one is saying that bids won't go higher, of course.

(The car is on display today, January 25, in New York at the Audi Forum at Park and 47th.)

The car is sometimes referred to as "Hitler's race car," seeing as how the German Chancellor in 1933 offered 500,000 reichmarks to a company that could design a car that highlighted Teutonic prowess. Ferdinand Porsche, an engineer at a firm called Auto Union (today's Audi) managed to grab some of that dough to help build a revolutionary car he had designed.

Over the next several years, that car was tweaked until it emerged as the 1939 Auto Union D-Type. With a 460-horsepower twin-compressor engine, the D eventually won the Grand Prix in France and Yugoslavia before all the models headed east with the Red Army.

The rest, as they say, is history--and if Christie's has its way, history will again be made when the D goes on the block. It's expected to fetch a record auction price.