News & Features October 2, 2008, 4:43PM EST

Gallic Classic

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All decisions regarding care for the "original" car are complex, subtle, and, given the newness of the field, rather fraught with opportunities to do real harm to the car, to one's pocket book, and to history. Conserving an unrestored car is an art best mastered through lots of experience; unrestored cars aren't for everyone.

There are three primary factors that led to this impressive sales price—good unrestored condition, an exciting competition car identity, and immaculate provenance. As far as condition goes, the new buyer really has something to work with here. Unlike some other unrestored cars, this car is in fine, unmolested condition, given its age and history.

While minor bits of bright trim, some interior pieces and other non-critical components are missing, the car is essentially complete. Further, its condition leads me to think that the vehicle can be brought back to a highly attractive appearance through careful and diligent cleaning, corrosion inhibition, and judicious in-painting with reversible materials, much as museums restore paintings or other works of art.

Reversible finishes allow in-painting

Indeed, our shop here in Florida has begun experimenting with reversible automotive finishes with highly satisfactory results. This material allows areas to be in-painted rather than wholly refinished with destructive permanent techniques, and further, to be refinished with materials that, should the decision be made to return the car to untouched condition, can just be washed off, leaving every bit of its original condition intact.

Additionally, missing minor components can be recreated, "softened" to blend with the car as a whole and thereby restore a complete look. It is all to the good that this car sat through the war years and was then vigorously raced, as the original look of the car in period would already have been somewhat used and patinated, as careful analysis of the period photographs show.

The car's competition history demands a rougher look than would a swoopy Figoni Goutte d'Eau Talbot boulevardier. I am always struck by the visual dissonance over-restored competition cars create with their fussy, too refined finishes of what, in the day, was an entirely disposable competition weapon that had only a small chance of finishing the season intact.

While M. Boncompagni campaigned his car largely in regional races within France, it comes to us with excellent history from the underappreciated postwar years, when motorsport was being revived. Its physical evidence, the provenance impounded in its very fabric, speaks to us of the drama of racing, showing as it does "makeshift field modifications that racing sometimes demands." These often hasty and crude modifications become a palimpsest of the car's history and speak eloquently of its reality in ways that are irredeemably erased once the restorer is put to work.

Finally, the car's provenance is immaculate, without holes in its chronology. And this car proclaims its authenticity with every blemish and ding; as the catalog entry says, "There are crudely welded metal pieces…leading the historian to discern that at one point…the car overheated." Once subject to detailed examination and sympathetic rehabilitation, who knows what secrets will emerge? And there you have the romance of a great unrestored automobile, the ability to commune with the past. To be for a moment back in 1950, with the smell of hot oil and the tick of cooling metal…Fairly bought.