PLEASURES OF THE ROAD : RECORD ALBUM : A portfolio of uniqueness: the oldest, the most beautiful, the most unusual and other Southern California automobiles of distinction

The car that lead this year’s Tournament of Roses Parade was a 1931 Bugatti Royale Berline de Voyage with a street value close to $10 million. It may well have been worth more than its esteemed passenger: Grand Marshal Gregory Peck.

Yet nobody seemed that impressed by the wheels.

The menacing, louvered and scooped Vector--a Venice-built sports car-cum-wingless Top Gun that its designer claims can turn 200 m.p.h., but which hasn’t done much except drive into Chevron gasoline commercials--huffs and snorts and grumbles and spits in Christmas traffic along Rodeo Drive.

Shoppers’ first glances are for Ryan O’Neal walking his son.

Second glances go back to Gucci.

The obvious point: Cars that would stop the town clock and entire population of Hudson, Ohio, are at every other parking meter and most stoplights in Southern California.

Here are more exciting vehicles, more Ferraris, Duesenbergs, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, Bugattis and Packards, all the flyers and speedsters, tourers, runabouts and raceabouts, coupes and cabriolets, than in any other corner of the world.

Here are the best motor cars. Here are the worst automobiles. Here are all ranking gear heads who drive, restore, collect, race, create, buy, sell and duplicate most things automotive from Bonneville bullets through the Batmobile to the Great American Pedal Car Co.

One man has refined his Palm Springs collection to include a matched set of classic cars. Another has Indianapolis racers in his living room. On a Beverly Hills side street, a handsome, creamy, topless 1936 Auburn Speedster rubs fenders with a 1980 Auburn Speedster replica made by Pasadena’s California Custom Coach. And that Bible black Ferrari (FASTV12 is the brag of owner Andy Cohen’s vanity plates) leaving the lot behind Beverly Hills Motoring Accessories really is the very first Ferrari Daytona ever built.

It follows that California cars fill several automotive categories in the current issue of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Yet it’s really a freak show, a roster of novelties with some assembled for no other purpose than the brief and debatable fame of being included in the book.

The Guinness list includes a solar-powered vehicle that barely got up to bicycle speeds on California roads, a 22-ton tractor built in Sacramento for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and a limousine long enough to command four parking meters. Also a 12,000-horsepower car (since dismantled) built in Los Angeles around four fighter-plane engines and a world land speed record of 739-miles-per-hour (since disputed) by a rocket-propelled car at Edwards Air Force Base.

Nothing romantic, glamorous or particularly touchable here.

Hence this review. Of the finest, fastest and most beautiful cars in Southern California. Of the most useless. Of the oldest and most expensive and oddest and most mysterious. Of superlative cars that make grown men sigh and maybe even . . . well, reach for a Guinness.

AN AURA OF FASCINATION

The most mysterious car in Southern California exists as a replica that has become a specter. The original--Porsche Spyder 550-0055, silver with red competition stripes atop its rear fenders--was wrecked at 5:46 p.m., Sept. 30, 1955, in an accident on Old Route 466 near Paso Robles. The driver, actor James Dean, was killed. At that moment, they say, myths and mechanical hauntings began.

Another sports-car racer salvaged pieces of the Porsche’s suspension system--and was killed when the car crashed at Pomona. Rolf Wutherich, a mechanic who was Dean’s passenger on the fatal drive, survived severe injuries--but not the emotional scars of the accident--and was killed when his car skidded off a German road in 1981.

George Barris of North Hollywood, King of the Kar Kustomizers who painted a name (Little Bastard) and racing numbers (130) on the Porsche only days before the accident, obtained the twisted carcass, and it was sent on a nationwide tour intended to remind young motorists that speed kills. In 1960, while returning to California by flatcar, the Porsche disappeared. Cut up for macabre souvenirs? Held by a private collector? Dumped in fright?

Nobody knows the truth. But as long as the search continues, a fascinating aura will surround the replica currently held in the Boses Collection, a movie-rental business owned by Scott Boses of Los Angeles.

The replica was built in 1967 around a 140-horsepower, four-cylinder Volkswagen engine. Says Boses: “Being a James Dean fan, I just wanted to have his car.” Boses often fires up the little screamer and heads north to tool Mulholland Drive. As Dean did. Sometimes Boses wears a leather jacket and scrunches his head down when he drives. Just like Dean. And sometimes, when imaginations are ripe and the silver Porsche squirts around a corner at a certain angle and the light is just right . . . .

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE . . .

The most beautiful car in Southern California, says the automotive artist, is without doubt the Delage D-8 120 garaged in Santa Monica. Or the Delahaye owned by Jim Hull.

No. The area’s most beautiful car, says the automotive writer, unquestionably is any Duesenberg in the Nethercutt museum, San Sylmar. Or the Delahaye owned by Jim Hull.

Wrong. The most beautiful car in Southern California, says the automobile executive and collector, has to be that first Daytona Ferrari. Or the Delahaye owned by Jim Hull.

Therefore, by a landslide of second place votes, the Miss Southern California of Motorcars is indeed the 1948 Delahaye 135 MS Vedette (take your pick . . . Vedette is French and English for scout, mounted sentinel or sentry box, none of which make much sense) owned by architect-designer Jim Hull.

Mechanically and technically, the Delahaye is a 160-horsepower, straight-six convertible designed by Henri Chapron, le grand-pere of French automotive designers, and first shown at the 1948 Paris Auto Show.

It’s handmade and it’s the only one there is, and its value is somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million--a pretty broad somewhere. The Delahaye also is every man’s automotive fantasy of a French mistress of leather, burled elm, Lucite, a chromium fascia and expensive touches right down to silk-screened numbers on the gauges and a St. Christopher horn button.

Aesthetically, says Hull, owner of a small, two-state chain of children’s furniture stores, the draw of the car is its classicism “from that fastback design that denoted speed before we ever realized you had to have a spoiler on the back, to its overall flourish as the end of the Art Deco period of French automobiles.”

Hull--a partner with businessman Peter Mullin in a 14-car collection of Talbot-Lago, Bugatti, Delage, Hispano-Suiza and three more Delahayes--bought the car in a probate sale in 1979. It had been owned by a Hollywood magician who had the car painted four times in 12 years without the vehicle once leaving the shop.

“We ground off 10 coats of paint to bare metal,” Hull says. “Originally, it was a two-tone blue, and there was consideration for returning it to that color.

“But a car should belong to its owners in every way. Green has always been a real happy color for me. So we painted it in two-tone green.”

Hull and Mullin are no white-gloved, feather-duster fanatics with their classics. Twice they have driven other cars in their collection more than 2,000 miles in the Monte Carlo Rally for historic vehicles. The Delahaye is driven regularly (there’s 24,000 kilometers on the odometer) and Mullin and Hull (along with their wives) have been invited by Prince Rainier to enter it in the Monte Carlo event.

‘IT’S A . . . ER . . . ROLLS-BENTLEY !’

Car builder Gary Wales of Woodland Hills creates specials that specialize in opening purists’ eyes. In horror. They rant at his plans. They rave at his ideas. Then, eventually impressed, pleasantly surprised and often apologetic, they have been known to applaud and reward his finished marques.

In 1980, Wales found a junkyard 1932 Talbot-London chassis and engine. He handcrafted an aluminum body and gave it a racing cockpit and aircraft instruments and motorcycle fenders that turned with the wheels.

The car looked so authentic, so antique, so Brooklands, that it was allowed into the historic-car races at Laguna Seca near Monterey. The historians figured it was one car overlooked in their learning. And now Wales’ unique, neo-classic Talbot-London racer is sitting in an auto museum in Florida.

In 1984, Wales unearthed, literally, a 1936 3.5-liter Bentley saloon that had been crushed and demolished in a California mudslide. Chassis and engine were salvageable. They form- ed the foundation of an immaculate burgundy, leather-upholstered roadster he called the Bentley Boattail Speedster.

It fooled everyone. Admitted as an entrant in the transcontinental Great American Race for cars built before 1936, Wales’ almost bogus Bentley won the event’s $100,000 first prize. Later that year, in England, Margaret Bentley, widow of automotive legend W. O. Bentley, endorsed the achievement by handing Wales the 1984 Mersevy Trophy of the Bentley Drivers Club.

Now Wales is at it again, and this time the production types at Rolls-Royce aren’t at all amused by his project--to mate two in-line, eight-cylinder Rolls-Royce engines into the world’s first and only V-16 tourer and Southern California’s most unusual form of transportation. “I’m building the best special in the world, period,” Wales says. “I’m putting my car together from genuine Rolls-Royce and Bentley parts from 1923 through 1983. We’re compressing 60 years of the marques into a viable machine that will run perfectly and look wonderful and establish new motoring excellence. Because it needs to be done.”

The power plant will be two Rolls-Royce Wraith engines from the ‘50s, mated like Siamese motors into a single transmission. They should develop 550 horsepower. The Rolls-Royce gearbox will be a five-speed, heavy-duty box like those used in fire trucks. Steering will be rack-and-pinion by Bentley. The whole will be four-place, long-snouted and flowing and will be christened--the Bentley Royale.

IT ONLY LOOKS STANDARD

It comes with everything you’d expect on a Pontiac Trans Am. Headlights and horn. Delco sound system. Door paneling. GM red paint. It motors like nothing you’d expect. At 280 m.p.h..

And if that be your want for lonely stretches of Interstate 10, says Gale Banks, namesake owner-president of Gale Banks Engineering of Azusa, which modified the car, be prepared to spend “mid-six-figure-type of numbers for a 15-man crew working tens of thousands of man-hours for three years on one particular little adventure.

“You will then have the fastest gasoline-powered production passenger car in California--in the world.”

Banks began the project at the request of the Pontiac Division of General Motors, which supplied the car.

“We wanted to see if we could get 300 m.p.h. from a car that basically I could then put a muffler on and drive on the street,” Banks says. “It’s called achieving the impossible dream.”

Impossible or not, Banks and his team began by restuffing the Trans Am with a marine-based, 454 GM engine. Plus two Garrett turbochargers (cooled by 25-pound ice packs) like those on Formula One race cars. Then high-flowing, aluminum, big-block cylinder heads. Then specialized tickling of pistons and valve train until they had a car putting out 1,600 horsepower at 7,400 r.p.m.

In August, Banks, his team, the car and driver Don Stringfellow arrived at American Siberia--the Bonneville Salt Flats north of Salt Lake City.

“Our terminal speed was 283 m.p.h.,” Banks says. “Our best one-way run was 277, and the two-way average of the five-mile course was 268.” Will the car achieve its magic 300 m.p.h.?

“Oh, sure,” Banks says. “Next year.”

THE WISDOM OF AGE

Elon Taliaferro, well retired, comfortably living in San Diego and lurking somewhere in his 70s, prefers the yesteryears. His friends are of 40-years standing. He has been a member of the Horseless Carriage Club of America since 1945. He dislikes chrome, plastic and modern cars with fixtures of chromed plastic. So he drives a Peugeot, an 1894 Peugeot.

“It certainly is the oldest car in California and maybe in the United States,” Taliaferro says. “The main thing is, it is original. Sure, I’ve done a few things to it, cleaned it up, given it a new water pump and buried a radiator beneath its flat bottom.

“But little else. If you have an original car, you keep it that way. I have an replica 1899 Berret and I should be popping my buttons about it. But it doesn’t mean that much to me. Because it is a replica.”

But, ah, the Peugeot. Built five years after the company was formed in Beaulieu-Valentigney, France, it was one of four dozen constructed that year and came with an interesting option--a whip for scaring off pursuing poodles.

Taliaferro regularly drives his straight back, two-cylinder, gasoline-powered, 4-horsepower Peugeot in San Diego. He also has a De Dion-Bouton built in Paris in 1904, a Russell-Knight, sole survivor of a marque built in Toronto in 1910, as well as three steam cars: a Mobile, a Grout and a Locomobile.

IT’S ONLY MONEY

In 1964, two Bugatti Royales were purchased by Bill Harrah, the late Reno car collector, gambler and millionaire. He paid $50,000 for one and $45,000 for the other. Aficionados were horrified at such prices.

In 1986 and 1987, two Bugatti Royales (including the yellow and black Berline de Voyage bought by Harrah 22 years earlier) were purchased by other collectors in the same high-rolling car club.

Thomas Monaghan, owner of Domino’s pizza and the Detroit Tigers, paid $8.1 million for his. At Christie’s in London, a British collector thumbed out $9.86 million for his.

Such exorbitance was anticipated.

So what does that make the Bugatti Royale currently housed in the private collection of Newport Beach home-builder William Lyon?

Certainly the priciest automobile in California and potentially the most valuable car in the world.

“It is insured for $11 million,” acknowledges John Sobers, curator of Lyon’s 54-car collection protected by alarms and armed guards in a museum at Trabuco Canyon southeast of Los Angeles. “It is a heck of a lot of money on wheels.”

The Lyon Bugatti is a chauffeur-driven Coupe de Ville with a body by Henri Binder of Paris. The paint is midnight blue and silver with red beneath the flared eyebrows of its fenders. The block and cylinder head are hand-scraped to a dull polish; the fire wall is machine-turned; the radiator is Ettore Bugatti’s fat, nickel-plated horseshoe, and the opulence is . . . for want of a better word, royal.

But is anything of wood and steel and wire and leather and rubber worth a royal ransom of $10 million? Or possibly $1 million more by next month?

“Is any painting, even by Van Gogh, worth $53.9 million?” asks Rick Cole of North Hollywood, buyer and seller and auctioneer of the majority of California’s exotic cars. “It is, of course, all in the eye of the beholder.”