"Barn" Find Of The Century: 1925 Bugatti Type 22 Brescia

Just how far would you go to restore a car? Would you dive to the bottom of a frickin' lake and haul an old wreck of a car just to resurrect it like Lazarus? You would, or at least I would, if it was a 1925 Bugatti. And that's just what some total nut jobs, er, I mean, dedicated gearheads will be doing.

When I was a little kid, my dad found a Kaiser Darrin in barn (no, literally in a barn) that was all there, but needed to be gone through and completely restored. Let me just put it this way: There was hay in the engine compartment. But by the time he got through with it (my dad, being a tool and die maker is very good with things like this) it was an award-winning car.

No doubt that is what the new owners of this Bugatti Type 22 Brescia will be aiming to do. But wait, you ask, how the hell did a car like this end up in a lake? Funny story, that.

In Paris in 1934 a Swiss man won the car from legendary racecar driver Rene Dreyfus in a game of poker. The new owner headed home in his new car, but when he got to the Swiss border, he was had to pay customs on the car. Uh-oh, the guy was lucky in poker, but unlucky with his cash flow at the time. Since he didn't have enough scratch he left the car at Lake Maggiore. The Swiss officials were required, by law, to destroy the car. And they figured the best way to do that was by pushing it into the lake.

So there is sat at the bottom of a lake, how did it make it back onto dry land? First, the Bugatti was discovered by a local diving club in the summer of 1967. Naturally it was quite the attraction for divers who would drop more than 170 feet to take a gander at what remained of the once legendary racer now residing at the bottom of the lake.

But then the story took another sad, yet ultimately hopeful turn. A young local man, by the name of Damiano Tamagni was brutally beaten and killed. The diving club determined they would try and retrieve the car and sell it to benefit the foundation created in Tamagni's name to combat youth violence. It took more than thirty volunteers and nine months, but they finally got the Bugatti lifted from the lake on July 12, 2009.

The Bugatti was put up for auction at Bonham's Retromobile sale in Paris earlier in the year. Bottom line: The Type 22 Brescia brought a top bid of £228,000. The winning bidder was the Mullin Museum in Oxnard, CA. The museum has decided to not restore the Bugatti and display it in its current condition.

Cool!

Source: AutoBlog