If you follow the magnificence of a good old-fashioned French-Italian automobile crossover, you know how special Talbot-Lagos are in general. And if you’ve really been paying attention, you’re even more aware that the best examples are kept close, secreted away in families across generations.
Luckily for all of our ogling eyes, a pretty amazing one just popped up. It’s got beautiful lines and an engine to match, of course. This March, Gooding & Company is going to sell the 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C-SS Teardrop Coupe at its 12th annual Amelia Island Auction presented by Gooding & Company the Friday before The Amelia Concours of Elegance. If you haven’t already obsessed over this marvel of engineering and design, or if you don’t know how cool French cars could be, do yourself a favor and look at this car before it passes on to a loving set of hands.
In French, this beauty is called the Goutte d’Eau, or, you guessed it, Teardrop. This stunning car was the brainchild of visionaries Anthony Lago and Joseph Figoni in the late 1930s. Anthony Lago was simply a savvy businessman until he found the bankrupt conglomerate Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq and decided to rework it. At the 1936 Paris salon, he revealed the Talbot-Lago T150 Grand Sport prototype, which wore coachwork by Joseph Figoni and a six-cylinder engine developed by lead engineer Walter Becchi.
This masterpiece boasts the ultimate sporting chassis, powered by a 4-liter 140 hp engine with three carburetors and a light-alloy hemi cylinder head. A low-slung, short-wheelbase chassis made it virtually identical to the company’s competition cars. Between 1937 and 1939, Talbot-Lago made very few T150-C-SS chassis, finished by a number of coachbuilders. But of course, the best ones were bodied by Figoni et Falaschi. The Goutte d‘Eau chassis 90107 is without a doubt his pièce de résistance and is the only one of its kind with fully skirted fenders with its original coachwork intact. Basically, it’s one of the best things French and Italian minds could possibly put together.
At the Concours d’Elegance Fémina held at Paris in 1938, the car won the Prix d’Excellence, where it was rumored to have been a gift for Princess Stella de Kapurthala. After making it to America, it passed through the hands of tycoons and actors alike, where it eventually ended up in the esteemed Nethercutt Collection. Since then, it has won some of the biggest honors on the modern concours circuit. This car has been a straight A student since its very start.
Stay tuned to watch this magnum opus of a car across the auction block at Amelia Island, Florida, where it is set to fetch a figure over $10,000,000. One look at it and you’ll understand why– check out Gooding and Company’s Amelia Island Auction page for more.
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