Carrozzeria Bertone has crafted some gorgeous
vehicles over the course of its long history. This somewhat obscure roadster is
among the most beautiful of them. It’s a 1954 Arnolt-Bristol Bolide Roadster,
one of only 130 made – and it’s coming up for auction.
The brainchild of Chicago-based industrialist
Stanley Harold Arnolt II, the classically proportioned sports car was built
atop a Bristol chassis, with a BMW engine and bodywork designed by Franco
Scaglione at Bertone. Arnolt wasn’t just a customer of the carrozzeria’s, but a
part owner, too, and this was his second commission following a series of
rebodied MG TDs.
The pre-war engine design, most notably employed in
the BMW 328, was unusually tall, but to our eyes, Scaglione packaged it
beautifully, with a hood scoop and sharply creased front fenders. The deep
metallic teal paintjob doesn’t hurt either, but only serves to augment what was
already a beautiful design to start with.
Chassis number 3033 pictured here is one of only a
handful of the cars known to have survived. And glad we are for that, as well
as the evidently painstaking restoration process that went into it. Bonhams will be auctioning it off
to the highest bidder next month at its Zoute sale in Belgium, where the
auctioneer expects it to sell for somewhere in the neighborhood of € 360,000, or
about US$ 420k at current exchange rates. That’s a big chunk of change to most of
us, but given its outstanding beauty and rarity, we’d say it’d be worth every
penny.
