Mullin Museum poised to invade Monterey Car Week with an octet of French beauties

1937 Delahaye 135 M/All images courtesy of the Mullin Automotive Museum

We all have our preferences when it comes to cars, whether your favorites wear a bowtie, a bowtie with checkered flags, a blue oval, a blue-and-white propeller-inspired badge or any number of exotic creatures on the radiator cap. We can argue all we want about whose machines were faster, or smoother or just plain better, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in any camp that doesn’t find coachbuilt prewar French automobiles beautiful.

The Mullin Museum is set to bring eight French cars to Monterey, with four that will be displayed at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, three will be run on the track at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion and one will be displayed at Gordon McCall’s Motorworks Revival.

On Wednesday, August 17, at the Monterey Jet Center, Gordon McCall’s Motorworks Revival will take place with the 1972 Citroën SM, the Maserati-powered French super coupe, its distinctive design and revolutionary engineering still misunderstood by many. Tickets for the Motorworks Revival are expensive and limited, so better to make those reservations now rather than later.

1927 Delage ERA 

At Laguna Seca, from August 18 through 21 for the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, Peter Mullin and his son Tim will be piloting a trio of stunning—and likely stunningly loud—French race cars. The oldest of the set is a 1927 Delage ERA that almost looks as if it could be a dry lakes hot rod from a later period. Originally powered by a 1.5-lier supercharged engine and then later by a two-stage supercharged ERA E-Type racing engine, the car was competitive into the Fifites.

 

1946 Delage D6-3L GP

The Mullins will also be driving a 1946 Delage D6-3L, the very car that powered Henri Louveau and his co-driver, Juan Jover, to a second-place finish at Le Mans in 1949, just one lap off the winning Ferrari 166MM. Surely, the local crowd must have pined for a victory of one of the many French cars running in the first iteration of the famous race following World War II. Though rebodied decades ago, Peter Mullin had the car restored in France to its original configuration after he bought it in 2002.

 

1950 Talbot-Lago Type 26 GP

The third competition car to be fielded by the Mullins will be a 1950 Talbot-Lago Type 26, somewhat of an elegant brute of a competition car, with its large, 4.5-liter, high-compression, twin-plug straight-six, good for 280 hp that could push the machine to an incredible 166 MPH. Peter Mullin has entered many vintage events the past decades since he was able to reunite the chassis with its original competition engine.

1912 Delaunay Belleville Omnibus

At the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, scheduled for Sunday, August 21, expect to see four truly special machines on the show field. The Mullin Automotive Museum maintains a truly spectacular collection of cars. While the 1912 Delaunay Belleville Omnibus may seem like a bit of an ungainly car to our eyes, the marque was the standard of its day, a nameplate favored by royals, most notably Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who had reportedly had dozens of the expensive machines at one point.

When it comes to beautiful French designs, few even come close to the bodies penned by Giuseppe Figoni, particularly the Mullin’s streamlined 1937 Delahaye 135M, one of three known to survive. It stunning lines are the very sort of thing most would expect to see on the 18^th fairway at Pebble Beach in August.

 

1937 Delahaye 145 M Coupe

Another glorious Delahaye in the vast Mullin collection is the 1937 145 M, a 184 hp V-12 powered machine that was original part of an audacious plan to set speed records. The Mullin collection now includes three of the four cars originally commissioned by French-American heiress and accomplished racer Lucy Schell for the “Million Franc Challenge,” a prize offered to the team that could run a French car 200 Km at a speed greater than the 146.5 KMPH performed by Chiron in an Alfa Romeo some years earlier. Ecurie Bleue claimed the money when René Dreyfus completed the challenge.

1939 Delage D8-120

Mullin also plans to exhibit a 1939 Delage D8-120, an eight-cylinder-powered, three-position cabriolet exhibiting the typically French beauty and elegance of the late pre-World War II era. From the hand of Henri Chapron, the prolific designer whose worked spanned parts of seven decades, this four-place cabrio, like the pair of Delages, seems well suited for Pebble Beach.

The Oxnard, California-based Mullin Automotive Museum contains many other French cars, the vast majority from 1951 or earlier. It’s certainly worth a visit if your travels take you to southern California. At the very least, if you are on the Monterey peninsula the third week of August, you will get a chance to glimpse at least a portion of the collection.

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