He rejected $50M - most valuable car on Earth

In what could possibly be at that time one of the most expensive cars in the world because the story is told that Jay Leno, who is very into Duisenberg's, walked up to Jimmy with literally a blank check and said, you put whatever number you want on this and I want to buy the first Duisenberg. The first of any car is always a special thing. It becomes more special when it's from an amazing brand I got to work with. When I first started working at Canopa, they were already one year into the restoration of the first production Duisenberg. Now Duisenberg, for the younger guys out there, was the car to have pre World War 2 and they were ferociously expensive. The model JS were what every movie star drove and it was the car to have and they were twice as expensive as a Cadillac or a Packard. Back then it was Creme de la Creme, the drive of Duisenberg. And if you take up Duisenberg for years to a concourse, you almost always won. They were. They're just the standard you heard. If you've ever heard the phrase, that's a doozy, that's where it comes from, the Duesenberg. So we're working on the first production Duesenberg, which has a great story. The Duesenbergs built engines and race cars pre, you know, the pre war, pre World War One, we're talking pre war and during World War One. They built aircraft engines, marine engines. They were geniuses. They were fantastic engineers. They had never built their own Rd. cars. They built engines for other companies for cars, but they never built their own production car. So like an equivalency of this would kind of be like, McLaren for years built amazing race cars and never built a streetcar. And then all of a sudden they build the F1 and you're like, wow, they built a car and it's worth millions and it's extraordinary and everybody has to have it. The Duesenbergs, after the war, their demand for their military stuff fell off, and they realized that they had maybe to start producing their own car to stay solvent. And they had a few very wealthy people who were kind of pushing them towards that. And this was 1919. And one of those gentlemen was Samuel Castle. Now who he was, was the son of the guy who found Castle cooked foods in Hawaii in 1851. And he is 7 feet tall. He's a 7 foot tall missionary from Hawaii. And they own, I think 95% of Lanai, the island of Lanai, which is the 6th largest island in Hawaiian chain. Most of Oahu through certain means of missionary and political stuff, which I won't get into, but Hawaii's history is a bit shady in that way. But an enormously wealthy man politician and, you know, big and sugar cane and, and things like that. His company eventually would become Dole Foods, which a lot of people know. So he's like, I want a Duisenberg Rd. car. You guys need to build a road car. And it took wealthy people like him to convince him of that. And they're like, OK, all right, we'll, we'll build a road car. Now they build race cars. That's what they do. So a a road car with a little foreign to them. So they built the road car kind of like their race cars. So their first car was called the Straight 8IN retrospect, a lot of people call it the Model A, but they were never called the Model A in the day. They only called the Model A once the Model J came out, but they were called the Straight A. They had a fabulous straight A logo with wings on it. It was really cool and it was the first road car with a straight A and an overhead Cam straight A. It was the most powerful engine ever put in a streetcar. And again, it was like build McLaren building, putting a race car engine in a street version. So this had 88 horsepower and this is back in the day when cars had like 40 or 50, so double the power of a normal car that could approach 100 miles an hour. And a in manufacture back then usually built especially the high end guys would build the chassis, the engine and everything and then they would send it to a body maker, a coach maker to build the body. So they built this amazing chassis, basically big race car, straight A. And the other thing the first time ever in history, 4 wheel hydraulic brakes, which was race car technology back then. So the first time that ever been put on a car, they sent this over to a company called Bender to build the chats the the body on it, because a lot of these bodybuilders were descendants of people who built carriages back in the 1800s. And they would build you whatever you want. They could build you sleek bodies, coops, limousines. They would turn these chassis into whatever you wanted. And he wanted a coop, but again, 7 feet tall. And we have a picture of him and you're like, yeah, man was huge. So the proportions of the car are kindly to say ungainly. It is not the most attractive car in the world, especially since the later Duisburgs were so beautiful. It kind of like something that a missionary would drive. It was black, it was very staid looking and kind of square. I got to sit in it and they had to make a pad, which the pad was in there from when we found it that you push the normal person towards the, the, you know, like a kid would have to have like something behind them to steer. A normal person needed the pad to get close to the steering wheel and the pedals. That's how big this guy was. They built this kind of strange body for it and sent it to him on a three masted schooner Is the story that it was sent over to Hawaii and it wasn't finished until 1921 and that's when Model A production began. They sent it over and you know, he must have been the king of Hawaii at that point. Like to have a car over there would be one thing, but to have a Deuceburg race car. Another thing that the car had, which we found when we were restoring it was really cool, is an exhaust cut off. So there was a lever inside where you could just send the exhaust right out the engine instead of out the back. Nice little race car thing. And that's how you could get close to 100 miles an hour with it was with the cut out. So you can imagine him blazing down these dirt roads in Hawaii with a straight 8 cut out going and just ripping through. Must have been a blast. So he had the car for quite some time. The Model J came out and it was our understanding that when it came out that he sent his car back to Duisenberg, crossed the ocean back to Indianapolis to have it updated with more J parts, like to kind of make it cooler. And they did. They changed the fenders a little bit. There's a different steering wheel and a couple little bits, nothing drastic. And then sent it back to him again on a ship. It remained in Hawaii for quite some time. He passed away. Samuel Castle passed away in 1959, I believe, and it went to his nephew James Castle, and he decided to bring it over in the 60s to San Francisco. This family stories go that eventually as the car got older, it was just used as like a pickup truck, Like they would just throw stuff in it. They'd bounce around Hawaii and they, the kids would get to drive it. And there were stories of like the cows trying to eat the interior through the window. So it, it had little value at that point. As far as you know, the being what it was the first Duesenberg, they bring it over. There was an article in a San Francisco newspaper about the first Duesenberg being brought over on a ship and a picture of it coming off the ship that I found was researching it as the historian. Then it went and did a show in 1968 and then went to the storage and sat kind of in storage for years. It eventually went to James Castle's son, Jimmy Castle, Jimmy Junior, who is the person who eventually brought it to Canopa. And interestingly enough, Bruce is famous for obviously Porsches and you know, Shelby Cobras and you know, certain types of really cars, but he's not known for pre war restorations. Jimmy's like, well, you, you've done my other cars. You need to do the Duesenberg. And Bruce goes, no, that's, that's not what I do. You know, Bruce knows his limits. He was like, that's I'd love to, but no. And I guess he bugged Bruce for like 3 or 4 years until Bruce finally went OK. You're, you know, you're a great friend, a great customer. Let's, let's see what it is. They bring it over and they start disassembling it and they hire a few specialists to work on it. The guy who led the charge was Dave Stoltz. And he is a master fabricator and funny enough is the guy who's going to be working on the Rocky Aoki Porsche with me. So he's there working on the 1st Duesenberg. He takes it apart and this car, I've been sitting in Hawaii for decades. In Hawaii, of course, it's a tropical region. Does tropical weather does not like cars? You have salt water in the air. You have, you know, the, the humidity and dampness and the cars made out of a lot of different things. Like then you know, the, the chassis was steel, the skin over the body was aluminum. The body itself, the framing of the body was made out of wood and beautiful ashwood body. Underneath the interior was wool, so there was mildew and mold and where aluminum meets steel, you have the reactions and it was just a mess as it came apart. But the goal was Bruce hired specialist for each different element, and he insisted that every part of the car that could be saved had to be saved. So if there was a rotted part in the Fender, you don't roll a whole new Fender. You cut that little section out and you make that little section and Weld it in. So that kind of meticulous work took years. It was until 2013 that it was done. The photographs of the body of the, of the, of the wood interior being done and they would cut out just the rotted parts and make another piece of wood and then glue it in so it fit perfectly and the grain matched up. Like that's the meticulousness that went into it. So that there was as much of the original car as possible. All the J stuff that had been added to it were removed so that it would go back to the way it came out of the factory. And one of the reasons for this is there weren't many pictures of this car. We found 44 photographs of this. The entire restoration had to happen from 4 pictures. Luckily they're all from slightly different angles and can kind of see the interior so we could see what the material was inside. But we blew them up. I got on Photoshop, we enhanced them. We did as much as we could with it to find out every specific detail. So I had to redo the wheels, how to redo the bottoms of the fenders, and I still have a couple pieces of the thrown away steel at my house. Like I've got a piece of the first Stephenburg. Over the years, they slowly reassembled the whole thing and the goal was to get it to Pebble Beach in 2013. During that build time, of course, you know, there's a, when you do restorations, there's lots of slow work. But as you get close to the days that it's going to happen, everything kind of snowballs. And right at the end, it's got to get together and a, you have to get the engine on the chassis and the body over the, the frame and, and they start putting it together. And I remember Bruce taking out for its first Test drive down the streets of Scotts Valley, CA, in what could possibly be at that time, one of the most expensive cars in the world. Because the stories told that Jay Leno, who was very into Duesenbergs, walked up to Jimmy with literally a blank check and said, you put whatever number you want on this and I want to buy the first Duesenberg. And Jimmy insisted that it had to stay in the family. So that was it. No, no check. Well, thank you very much. But numbers are being thrown around like $50 million in 2013 about what this would be worth. And some people said even more, but it would never be sold. So we'll we'll never know. So he's driving this Italian dollar car for its first time down the roads in traffic and comes back and he's like, it's not running really. It's not running, right? And now we're getting within weeks of Pebble Beach and everybody's getting a little nervous. The interior's done. It's not running right, they find. And this is within a week of having to go to Pebble, a crack in the straight 8 block. You know, it's run for the first time in decades. And it, you know, talking about really old, old materials, they find a crack in it. What do you do? It's like you're not going to go machine a new Duesenberg block. You're not going to go find a straight 8 loner somewhere and put it in there. And it's also the body has to be taken off to get the engine out because it's so massive. So they have to fix it in the car. And this was one of the coolest things I saw there. There's a company that makes these little screw inserts. You drill a hole and you screw in the insert into the end of a crack. Then you drill halfway through that first insert and you screw in another one. And you stitch these things together. And it's actually stronger than the block itself. And they, you, they do these things in massive scale. When cruise ships fail, like in port thousands of miles from a dock, they will go out and they put these massive things to fix the blocks of, you know, cruise ship engines. So this is a smaller version. We call the owner of the company. And him, he came out himself. He heard the first Duesenberg was doing it. So he flew out with him and his wife came out, worked overnight stitching this thing together bit by bit. And one mistake, right? And you're done. Next morning, fixed. Next morning, turn it on perfect little bit of buffing, little cleaning, didn't even know that was far way far back on the end of the engine towards the firewall. It was a difficult place to get to. They did it amazing save right before it has to go to Pebble Beach. Needless to say we made it to Pebble Beach which it was a huge hit there. Now, for people who have never been to a very high end concourse, the concourse is more about the people and the politics than it really is about the cars. We had brought the first Duesenberg restored perfectly. We had advice from the Duesenberg Museum, from Duesenberg experts. Everything on it was exactly the way they took it apart, put back together again. It was meticulously gone through. In the Duesenberg class. It took second place and people were Hacked Off as you'd imagine. Jimmy totally cool. He's like, whatever. He's like, I want to drive my kid, my grandkids to McDonald's and this he's like, this was just for fun. But for the team, it was hurt. And Jay Leno actually was there when the judges came through and they picked out some nitpicky thing about the car. And Jay Leno, who had, by the way, has a flip phone, which I thought was funny. Phobus's phone calls his Duesenberg guy and he's all like, no talk to him. This is correct. This is correct. Jay Leno was trying to defend the car there on the field and they're like, Nope, Nope, Nope. You've got 10 minutes to fix this wiring thing that the wires were wired incorrectly to the tail lights or something was weird like that. And Charlie Burton, who is one of the head builders there, he's under there fixing it and gets it right. They bring the judges back and look, we, we fixed it. No, they gave it like, you know, the classic car award or some kind of, you know, secondary award really. We had people come over to us afterwards and they're like, who were pretty famous people I can't mention, but they're like, that car should have won its class. That car should have won Best of show, hands down. There were politics going on and it's unfortunate when it comes to that, but this was amazing. It would go on to win another concourse that we sent it to and it it went on to get some acclaim, but Jimmy wasn't really interested in showing it. Jimmy wanted to drive it, and he did. In fact, he drove it at the Pebble Beach. They have a drive before the concourse that if you drive your car in that drive around Pebble Beach with these amazing cars, that if two cars tie, the car that did the drive wins. That's the tiebreaker. And Jimmy's like, heck yeah, I'm going to drive it. And it drove great. He had a great time in it. And that's that was his idea. I'm going to drive it. He goes, yeah, I spent all this money on it. It's going to stay in the family. We're going to drive it. We're going to have fun with it. And that's what he did for years. But eventually he's like, you know, his family wasn't interested in it. They're not, I guess, car people like he is. And Jimmy's a big car nut. So he's like, well, what do I do with it? I don't want to sell it. I want it to leave the family. And I don't want it to move into another hands. So his decision was to donate it perpetually to a museum, the Auburn Cord Duisenberg Museum in Indiana, which seems like the appropriate place. I think first choice was like the Smithsonian because of its history, but the Duesenberg Museum obviously fantastic. And the idea was that it's a perpetual donation, which means that the museum can never sell it to an individual. It has to go from them if they lose it to another museum, that it will be forever in the hands of the public, that people will always be able to see the first Duesenberg and enjoy it and enjoy its story just the way I do. So if you get a chance, go out to Indiana, go to the museum and check out the most awesome first Duesenberg. Over the last four years, we partnered with GLOSS at to show off some of their amazing detailing products, give you some great deals and show how much they can transform any car. But did you know that GLOSS at University is also one of the most amazing online resources for education, mentorship and coaching for whatever your business is in the detailing space, Whether you do paint correction, ceramic coating, PPF wraps, anything like that, they can take your business to the next level. And right now they're offering free 15 minute phone consultations where you can schedule at the link in the description below. 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