License to Build - Licence to Build
02/13/2015
You may remember the James Bond film "License to Kill". Some of you may have thought of this movie title when you looked at the Baillon collection at the Rétromobile in Paris, which was auctioned off on February 6, 2015 at almost unbelievably high prices .
On closer inspection, many of the cars presented themselves in a very dilapidated state and less as restoration objects than as rolling sculptures or works of art that deserved to be exhibited and viewed simply in their current condition. Nevertheless, we will of course see the unique and special individual bodies such as the three Saoutchik cars in new splendor at prominent concours events in a few years' time.
However, there was widespread agreement in Paris that these will probably be recreations or complete rebuilds and that the proportion of original material is unlikely to be too high. So anyone who secured one of these valuable one-offs for between 350,000 and 1,450,000 euros was in principle also acquiring the license for a replica of the one-off and may soon have two cars at their disposal, namely the barn find and the rebuilt "original". But perhaps we are mistaken, and the substance beneath the rust is much better preserved than the rust ...
