Originally published at: Up for auction: the gearbox from James Dean's doomed Porsche 550 Spyder | Boing Boing
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No thanks.
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Why?
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Isn’t imbued history (onto objects with no intrinsic value) a fascinating human psychological tendency? Folks will line up for hours just to view the piano that John Lennon wrote “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on, or pay large amounts at auction for Churchill’s dentures. It’s a purely mental association to some past judged significant providing value. All of which still seems to make a bit more sense than any NFT.
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I imagine the people who are interested in this are the same that would have one of those posters showing Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart all together. Whenever I see those I assume the owner has never seen a single film any of them appeared in.
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Looking at pics from the wreck the answer may be “because it’s one of the only parts of the car that wasn’t mangled beyond recognition.”
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Good luck, Mr. Winning Bid.
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It’s entirely possible this could be used to resurrect Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder. It’s quite common in the classic car world to reconstruct an all-new car out of a verified piece of one that’s been otherwise destroyed. Case in point: one of my customers back in my racing shop days had a Ford GT-40 that had been “restored” from a Belgian team car that had burned up in an accident. The only original part on the car was the roof panel. Likewise I’ve heard stories about how there are several Bugattis built out of pieces of a wrecked car, sometime just a wheel or something dumb like that, each claiming to be the “original”.
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Alec Guinness felt a disturbance in The Force when he first saw the car. He even tried to warn James Dean not to drive it.
- Alec Guinness who died in 2000 revealed that James Dean met him just a week before the fatal car crash took place. Alec detected in the first look that something wasn’t right about the car. Describing his interaction with Dean, Guinness started with a little sketch of the new car, “There in the courtyard of this little restaurant was this little silver thing, very smart, all done up in cellophane with a bunch of roses tied to its bonnet.”*
- Guinness added on,“I said, ‘Have you driven it?’ and he said, ‘No. I have never been in it at all,’ And some strange thing came over me. Some almost different voice and I said, ‘Look, I won’t join your table unless you want me to, but I must say something: Please do not get into that car, because if you do’ — and I looked at my watch — and I said, ‘if you get into that car at all, it’s now Thursday (Friday, actually), 10 o’clock at night and by 10 o’clock at night next Thursday, you’ll be dead if you get into that car.’”*
- Dean laughed and shrugged off Guinness’s advice-cum-warning. Seven days later, the worst nightmare came true. Alec called Dean’s death ‘a very very hard spooky experience.’*
It should be noted that Dean’s accident wasn’t the result of his reckless driving. A driver in the opposite lane made a left hand turn into Dean’s lane, hitting him head on.
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James Dean’s ex-transaxle #10 046. There is no death curse…there are only embellished myths …that have all been refuted decades ago. Lee Raskin, JD., James Dean / Porsche 356/550 historian and author
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My question had to do with more than the mechanical suitability of the part as a collector’s item.
I was also asking why it would be considered desirable to own because of the association with Dean, or, more ghoulishly, his death.
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Turnupseed didn’t turn left into Dean’s lane so much as across it, which was legal. But James Dean was also driving over the posted speed limit, giving the other driver less time to see him coming and both drivers less time to react. Neither driver was entirely blameless but the coroner’s inquest found Turnupseed hadn’t done anything illegal.
It’s possible that the accident still would have occurred if Dean hadn’t been speeding since that was a dangerous stretch of highway (the ambulance even got sideswiped on the way to the hospital!). It’s also likely the accident could have been avoided if Dean had observed the speed limit. We’ll never know.
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I almost called him “Tudor” but that was actually the name of the vehicle he was driving.
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Hm, the Car of Theseus?
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Seven degrees and fifteen minutes. We all want to touch the stars:
Haha basically.
The company that I worked for undertook a restoration project on a 1960s sports racing car for a client. Decades of abuse and deferred maintenance meant that the original components kept getting tossed out and replaced with new replicas. The fiberglass body panels were too chopped up so molds were found and new ones created, the tubular frame was structurally compromised to a new one was created from scratch, old clapped out engine was replaced with new Ford 289, etc. etc. In the end, the only original component was the steering rack.
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Funny, but we’ve actually had “car of Theseus” debates here in the past.
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Ooh, I’d missed that. I encountered the concept through the wonderful Natalie Haynes, that rara avis who is both a classicist and a stand-up comedian. I can warmly recommend her podcast Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics.
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James Dean’s ‘doomed’ Porsche 550 Transaxle #10 046. Your story is appreciated…but fact checking goes a long way to dispel the hyped death curse and embellished myths. Lee Raskin, JD., James Dean and Porsche historian / author.
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