What about barn finds in Belgium?

Barnfind, sortie de grange, Scheunenfund and Ladefund. Just about every language has a word for barn finds, or discoveries of previously lost objects. When it comes to cars, such as the extensive Palmen collection in Dordrecht, AutoWeek always pays attention to it. Yet one recently slipped through the cracks of the editorial net…

Borderline cases

230 forgotten classics going under the hammer together, that has never happened in Belgium. Yet barn finds occasionally occur in the land of the Red Devils, such as three years ago in Maaseik, Limburg. There, a Belgian auction house was offered a collection of 120 cars, appropriately parked in an old barn. Details about the owner(s) have never surfaced, but it is known that it was a remarkable collection. The lion’s share consisted of French, Italian and American cars, supplemented with banal models such as a first generation Ford Mondeo. Caravans and motorcycles were also included, along with a few outliers, such as a manual Fiat 130 Coupé, a Panhard Dyna, a Rover P5 and an Alfa Romeo 6.

Much smaller in number, but just as valuable, were the three Bugattis that were found in Lanaken, Limburg, in 2019. ‘For one million Bugattis hidden in a shed’, was the headline in the Belgian newspapers at the time, although the story behind it was just as striking. Visual artist August ‘Guus’ Thomassen saved the cars from demolition decades ago and bought them for next to nothing. Not to actually drive them, but ‘to be inspired by their curves’. This involved a Bugatti 40 from the 1920s, a Bugatti 49 faux coupé Gangloff from 1932 and a Bugatti 57 Graber Cabriolet from 1937. The Maastricht resident even built a new body for the Type 40, which unfortunately was not finished. At the age of 95, he had had enough after an attempted burglary, after which the cars in Paris went under the hammer.

Brigitte Bardot

Surprisingly there are Last month, another 22 sports cars were ‘recovered’ in a Brussels warehouse. The owner, who had moved abroad, had parked them there ten years ago and then apparently forgotten about them. Until one fine morning he woke up and said to himself: “Right, I still have sixteen Ferraris and six Porsches from the seventies, eighties and nineties in Brussels.” Not the least, by the way, but five Testarossas and even a Ferrari 250 GTE. Among the Porsches, the 930 Turbo stood out, although even it paled next to the canary yellow 365 GT4 BB. That’s the famous coupe from the 1970s that was called the Berlinetta Boxer, but was actually neither. Apparently the designers were so crazy about Brigitte Bardot that they secretly added the BB emblem, which must have been one of the more impressive strokes of that time (in both Flemish senses of the word).