The Bugatti stank.

That wasn't an aesthetic judgment from the Greenwich Concours d'Elegance, where a rare 1938 Type 57C Bugatti Atalante coupe sat beneath a Christie's auction tent. Instead, the moldy reek that hit my nostrils, the antithesis of new-car smell, testified to the 45 years the Bugatti had spent decaying in a suburban New York garage. The seller was John W. Straus, 87, a car collector and retired Macy's executive who was instrumental in the store's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Yet to the unnamed collector who paid $852,500 for the Bugatti -- more than double the pre-auction price estimate -- the car's scrapyard condition was a plus. The Bugatti was a lost-but-recovered treasure, a faded canvas for a historically correct restoration that will require thousands of labor hours and cost $200,000 or more.

"The owner can now treat the car and the restoration with the respect it deserves," said Rik Pike of Christie's.

The supercharged, eight-cylinder Atalante was the brainchild of Jean Bugatti, the son of company founder Ettore Bugatti. The culmination of Jean's engineering and design talents, the Atalante's triumph marked his ascendancy in the company. But the marque's future died with the scion in 1939, when Bugatti was killed while testing the 57C racer on a highway in the Alsace, near the company's home in Molsheim, France.

The Bugatti was the star of the Christie's roster, but it wouldn't have cracked a Top 10 of the most valuable classic automobiles at the 12th annual concours on the shores of Greenwich Harbor.

As with older and more-established concours -- Pebble Beach in California and Meadow Brook in suburban Detroit are Nos. 1 and 2 -- the blue blazers and blue bloods were out in force. But in contrast to tweedier-than-thou Pebble Beach, Greenwich has a more relaxed vibe that extends to judging. So-called "French rules" urge judges to rely on their knowledge but to also vote with their hearts. Actor Edward Herrmann, the concours' chief judge, had a simple message for his colleagues.

"Don't choose an ugly car," he said.

That edict was followed in the Best in Show category, which happened to honor another Bugatti Type 57, this one a roadster from 1937, owned by noted Greenwich collector Malcolm Pray.

Not every auction car required a six-car garage or a seven-figure checking balance. My budget eye was drawn to a 1968 Mercedes SL 280 California Coupe, about as head-turning a car as one could find for the $24,200 it fetched.

Among my favorites from the first of two show days, which largely focussed on American iron:

A 1934 Packard LeBaron sport coupe (left), one of only four made, which took Best in Show for American-made cars. It's owned by Joe and Margie Cassini, a New Jersey couple whose Horch 853A had previously taken Best in Show at both Pebble Beach and Meadowbrook. Joe Cassini said that Packard had spent $18,000 to build each of the cars -- a shocking sum in '34 -- but sold them new for $10,000, as much as the market would bear. The Packard featured amazing Art Deco detailing inside and out: Burl walnut, a sliding sunroof, a gas cap hidden in the trunk to avoid breaking up the car's symmetrical lines.

A 1966 Ford GT40, the street version of the Motown racers that hammered Ferrari on their own haughty turf at the 24 Hours of LeMans in ‘66, sweeping the top three spots to leave Enzo Ferrari crying in his Chianti.

A 1937 Cord 812 Coupe, one of only three made from the company that produced some of the most beautiful and advanced cars of its era.

A 1948 Pontiac 28 Silver Streak wagon, in all its wood-paneled glory, topped with a surfboard for this show.

The Lincoln Indianapolis, a creamsicle-orange, one-off design fantasy from 1955, bodied by Italian coachbuilder Boano, once owned by Henry Ford II.

-- LAWRENCE ULRICH

While you might not want to see any of these black-and-whites (and blue-and-whites, and green-and-whites) in your rearview, you still might want to swing by the New York City Police Museum this weekend to check out the Seventh Annual Vintage Police Car Show.

Classic patrol cars -- from a 1939 Ford Highway Patrol vehicle to a still-sleek 1971 NYPD Harley-Davidson -- will be displayed next to famous wheels from television, including that original (and still the best) Gotham City crime-fighting machine: the Batmobile.

Carlo Mollino (right) did a little bit of everything amazingly well. He was a brilliant designer, engineer, architect, and photographer who was always just enough "outside" the fields he dabbled in to really turn things on their heads. In fact the catalogue of the Mollino show at Turin likens him to that extravagant, hungry genius, Ettore Bugatti.

After creating the Bisiluro and witnessing its demise at Le Mans in 1955, Mollino only dreamed of going even faster, drawing up designs for a car (left) intended to shatter land speed records. Putting everything into the need to keep the car on the ground, he created what is essentially an upside down airplane wing--its driver lying on his back, like a luge rider--with only a tiny windscreen to peek through. The real gift of the current Mollino show in Turin is a life-size model of the car he never got to produce, lovingly crafted by 87-year-old Milanese coach-building company Carrozzeria Stola.

From there Mollino moved on to aeronautics, developing planes and his own air-show stunts inspired, Leonardo-like, by his studies of nature. "The essence of Mollino's aerobatics," writes Fulvio Ferrari in an essay from the beautiful Mondalori Electa book, Arabesques (2006), from which these images are borrowed, "lies in the imitation of [the perfect manoevres]" of the falcon or the swallow "with their darting flight and their weaving and unexpected turns." (Right: A detailed, hand-written plan for a series of Mollino's swooping, swerving airplane stunts.)

The dirty photos (see Part I) came later--and he kept right on shooting them into the 1970s.

(Thanks to designboom, where we found out about the Turin show.)

-- OWEN PHILLIPS

Part I

We realize that the recent Motoring Blog entry on F. T. Marinetti's writings and rantings about speed, machine-gun fire, and paving over the canals of Venice might have seemed a little nuts, but as there are only a few days left to see the great Carlo Mollino show at the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, popularly known as GAM, in Turin, we now have cause to renew our reflections on velocity-mad Italian Modernists. (That's Mollino sitting there on the chassis of his "Bisiluro," above. Read more about the Bisiluro below.) Not expecting to spend time in the cradle of the Italian automobile this weekend? Let's hope some innovative curator will import the show stateside.

(All of these images, by the way, are courtesy of the good people at Mondadori Electa publishing.)

Mollino is primarily known here--when he's known at all---for a secret stash of simultaneously beautiful and seamy Polaroids of semi-nude prostitutes unearthed and lavishly published by Arena a few years ago. He's also known for some intensely eclectic modernist furniture. But what might be news even to those long familiar with Mollino's work is the genius-dilettante's dabbling in car design. In 1953 this son of an engineer got excited about a Maserati-produced OSCA 1100 that had won that year's 24 Hour Le Mans race; he started sketching aerodynamic improvements to the body right on photographs of that car.

Developing his ideas to their extreme, he soon produced an asymmetrical, catamaran like car, the Bisiluro ("twin torpedo"), with one sleek hull for the driver and one for the engine. These were connected by a wing-like structure that housed an ingenious curved radiator, flaps to aid braking and a negative-lift wing to keep the car from taking off into the sky.

The car is stunning, but it didn't do so well at Le Mans in 1955. While it averaged 89 mph, its off-kilter construction made it almost impossible to control on turns and it was eventually run off the track and into a ditch by a Jaguar D-type driven by Mike Hawthorn, who went on to win the race. (As it turned out, from Mollino's perspective that minor crash might have been for the best; a bit later in the race, a Mercedes-Benz 300SLR driven by Pierre Levegh clipped Lance Macklin's Austin Healey 100S. Levegh's car hit a wall and exploded into the grandstand, killing 77. See a video of the crash here.)

The Bisiluro remains intact after all these years, and is usually housed at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia in Milan. But for now the car itself, numerous sketches chronicling its production, and photos of its short history (at once glorious and somewhat comical) can be found at Turin.

--OWEN PHILLIPS

The notion that one man's junk is another man's passion certainly rings true when looking back at a true American marvel--the hot rod-- and few aficionados celebrate those cars with the passion of our old pals at The Jalopy Journal ("spreading the gospel of traditional hot rods and kustoms to hoodlums worldwide"). For instance, the images above and below (which we poached from the TJJ site -- thanks, guys!) accompanied a two-part treatise on jalopyjournal.com called "As They Were," in which the fellows who started the whole hot rod phenomenon are recalled in words and not a few amazing, evocative black-and-white pictures.

The era of the hot rod took off when some visionary speed demons discovered that a huge supply of "junk" cars that had been manufactured prior to 1942--particularly Fords and Chevys--could be purchased on the cheap. These cars were then heavily modified, with engines and transmissions replaced to increase the cars' power and speed.

While in the mid-sixties the need for hot rod construction waned as the supply of junk cars diminished and newer autos were being built specifically to handle greater speed, the "kustom kulture" around these cars refused to die. And the hot rodders' handiwork had, in effect, launched a cultural phenomenon--music, fashion, art and television shows all emerged out of the scene.

Roots rockers, drag racers, low riders, punk rockers, and scooter boys have all customized vehicles to go along with their off-the-beaten-path lives and outlooks. Looking back, one senses that the "Greatest Generation" and the one immediately following it didn't just build America into the world's premier economic powerhouse; they also helped create one of the nation's most original and longest-lasting counter "kultures."

--NIA ELIZABETH SHEPHERD

More than a few of us grew up with posters of some sort on our bedroom walls.

Ballplayers. Musicians. Scantily clad ... artists, let's say, of the large and small screens. And, admittedly, many of us thought we'd grown out of that stage in which we see a poster and think, "Oh, man. I have to have that."

Happily, though, those days are here again. L-dopa.com features a Jet Set Modern Collection of sport posters, including some amazing examples from European racing in 1960s and '70s, that are pretty much guaranteed to get motors running.

Whether it's a shot from "24 Heures du Mans" where one can pretty much smell the fuel and burnt rubber, or just a simple picture of a Porsche hugging a curve at around, oh, 150 mph, these posters put you there.

Time travel doesn't come much cheaper (or more graphically cool) than this.

The founder of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, had an awful lot to say about internal combustion engines, speed, technology--in short, he wrote a lot about the same sort of stuff that many of us like to read and write about, i.e., fast cars; the feel of blasting along an empty road in a convertiable; fishtailing around a corner just to feel that awful/lovely fear and adrenaline in one's belly.

Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux recently published a new edition of Marinetti's writings, and more than a few entries seemed ripe for inclusion in a blog devoted to motoring. Here's a sampling--fasten your seat belts.

From THE FUTURIST MANIFESTO (1909):

"We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked out with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath...a roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace."

His extraordinary vision of man and motor car as one being:

"We have therefore to prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with his motorcar, so as to facilitate and perfect an unending exchange of intuitions, rhythms, instincts, and metallic discipline, absolutely unknown to the majority and only guessed at by the brightest spirits."

His prescription for making Venice (of all places) more attractive, according to Futurist precepts--as well as a few weirdly personal, comical swipes at the marvelous, decaying old city itself:

"Your Grand Canal, when widened and deepend, must inevitably become a great commercial port. Once your canals have finally been filled in, trains and trams will be hurtling along the great streets built over them, bringing stacks of merchandise to a discerning public, which is rich, and busily employed by industrialists and businessmen! There's no use howling against the presumed ugliness of the locomotives, trams, motorcars, and bicycles, which for us represent the opening lines of our great Futurist aesthetic. They're always good for flattening a few filthy, grotesque, Nordic professors, sporting their little Tyrolean hats. But you love to fawn on foreigners, and your servility is despicable!"

Finally, the clear, poetic enunciation of his view that speed, in the end, is what it's all about:

"Let us imitate the train and the motorcar, which compel everything that exists along the way to move at the same speed in the opposite direction, and arouse in everything that exists along the way s spirit of contradiction, that is, of life. The speed of the train decrees that the landscape it crosses be divided into two landscapes that rotate in the opposite direction from its own. Every train carries away with it the nostalgic spirit of anyone who watches it passing by. Things that are some distance away--trees, woods, hills, mountains--look fearfully at this rushing forward of things that are flung in the opposite direction to the train. Then they decide to tag along with them, but despondently, and more slowly. Every body moving at speed rocks from side to side and tends to become a pendulum.

"Race along race along race along fly fly. Danger danger danger danger to right and to left below and above inside and out scent breathe drink in death... To enjoy more coolness and more life than in rivers and seas, you have to fly in the ice-cold slipstream at full speed."