Daily Times Monitor
A ‘Bugatti’ which lay forgotten in a dilapidated garage for nine years has been sold for £270,000 – nearly three times the amount it had been expected to fetch, reported Daily Mail. The car had been abandoned in a garage in Worcestershire, unused and unloved, covered with bags of rubbish and become blocked in by trees and other debris.It had been owned by engineer Alan Riley who bought the car in 1987 and was convinced it was a real Grand Prix-winning Bugatti Type 51 worth up to £2million. He believed the car was the Bugatti that won the 1931 Casablanca Grand Prix, driven by Count Stanislas Czaykowski. But when he died earlier this year after a long illness the UK’s leading Bugatti expert David Sewell was brought in to establish the car’s true provenance. He determined it is almost certainly a very skillfully executed replica, although it may contain parts of the Czaykowski car. It was probably made in the early 1980s by a character called Keith Butti of Upminster who has since become notorious for making a number of very convincing replica Bugattis using a mixture of genuine and reproduction parts.
