The average non-enthusiast onlooker, seeing the 1925 Brescia Bugatti that was rescued from the bottom of Italy's Lake Maggiore last summer, would probably describe it as a piece of junk. If they were told that it sold at Bonham's Rétromobile auction in Paris for 260,500 euros (about $361,200) they'd probably walk away in amazement, thinking the buyer must be mad. In a way I'm with that average man, for it does seem like an extraordinary amount of cash for something ClassicDriver magazine describes as a "vintage sports car now reduced to a latticework of corroded metal." Even the original auction estimate, about a quarter of that price, bordered on the absurd.

Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I can't conceive of the kind of wealth that would allow someone to buy an old car that had spent 84 years of its life underwater even though it was brand new when it took that dive into the deep. Come to think of it, I can't imagine anyone actually pushing a Bugatti into a watery grave, but the story behind the Brescia is rather intriguing.

The post-WW1 Bugatti Type 13 was a fast, hand-made racing car. In 1921, Bugatti redesigned the original engine with one of the first four-valve heads in the industry and fielded a team at the Brescia Grand Prix, where it claimed the first four places. It renamed the car Bugatti Brescia and began selling copies to eager customers. An article in Autoblog relates that "four years later, a Swiss dealer placed an order for three Bugatti Brescias, and while the first two were paid in full, the third customer somehow failed to pay the applicable duties to import the car and it was subsequently abandoned in Lake Maggiore in northern Italy along the Swiss border. There it sank deeper and deeper for decades before being discovered by divers in the 1960's."

And there the Brescia remained until one Sunday in July, 2009 when a recovery team brought it out of the water, where the car immediately took a bow by exploding one of its tires in front of a startled crowd.

The winning bidder, a European representative of the Peter Mullin Collection in California, successfully outbid another American collector who had planned on restoring the vintage sports car. Instead it will be displayed in its 'as found' condition. The good news is that the sale benefited the Damiano Tamagni Foundation, which works to prevent youth violence, so whatever I or others may think about the value of a rusty old hulk, the money was well spent. And who knows, if ever I see that Bugatti Brescia in the metal perhaps I'll drop on one knee out of respect for "The Lost Jewel of Maggiore."