Further to my previous post on the Auto Union D-Type, I see that Christie’s are now saying that they expect the D-Type to fetch in the region of $12,000,000. There is an inaccuracy in CNNMoney’s article on the car that I ought to correct, however.

It is not quite true to say that Auto Union are now known as Audi. Auto Union were exactly what their name states, an amalgamation of several German manufacturers, one of which was known as Audi. In the sixties, Auto Union was absorbed into Volkswagen but was allowed to disappear, apparently forever.

In the seventies, when VW decided that they needed a new marque to make luxury cars and to dissociate it from the company’s “beetle” image, someone obviously remembered that they held the rights to the Audi name and it was duly resurrected. It can hardly be said that Audis are the descendant of the D-Type, therefore - only the Audi name survived.

But I don’t suppose VAG will mind at all if their cars are associated in some way with the D-Type - it was a glorious beast, after all. Just take a look at this…

Citroens are an acquired taste. For over fifty years their quirkiness and idiosyncracies have meant that only the adventurous find out how good they are. I became a Citroen man immediately upon buying my first ever Citroen, an AX 14TZS (I really wanted a GT but only two-door versions were available at the time and the family insisted).

It was the best car I ever owned. Suddenly all those Citroen oddities made sense; the single-spoke steering wheel, for instance. I had always thought of it as a gimmick but use one and you realise that now your thumbs can roam unrestricted around the wheel.

The AX turned out to be the perfect Q-car - named after the Q-ships of the First World War, merchant ships fitted with hidden guns that could blast a submarine out of the water. In the same way, the TZS looked so ordinary, without the give-away spoilers and deep splitter of the GT, but it was nearly as quick and handled just as well. Many are the boy racers who were left gasping at the lights as my little red bomb disappeared into the distance.

It weighed almost nothing, you see. The bonnet was so thin that you had to guard it to prevent it being dented by some idiot sitting on it. The rear door was hung on the rear glass, without supports and, as a result, too enthusiastic a slamming of the tailgate would result in the window smashing and the door hanging forlornly from it’s lock. All was forgiven because it was so good to drive.

They raced AXs in France and it was like a renaissance of the mini days of the sixties - hordes of little screamers fighting to be into the corner first. That surely must have been so much fun as to be worth making illegal. The end came far too soon for me.

Citroen replaced the AX with the Saxo, much closer to the Peugeot vision of normality and so much more boring too. In England, some fool drove his Jaguar out of a side street and mangled my TZS beyond repair. All good things come to an end sooner or later, I suppose.

But that little car made a Citroen man of me. I’d never have believed it thirty years ago but now, given the choice, I’d buy Citroen every time. How the mighty are fallen…

Christie’s are going to be auctioning one of the only two 1939 Auto Union D-Types in the world. It is expected to fetch the highest ever price for a car of any sort.

The D-Type was Auto Union’s response to Hitler’s demand that German cars be unbeatable in racing. I’m sure we all have seen photographs of the rear-engined monster, a car so ferociously difficult to drive that only the truly talented (and brave), like Nuvolari and Caracciola, could drive it.

But what a gorgeous monster it is! As I mentioned in a previous post, its looks were to influence the design of the Audi TT Coupe, a distant inheritor of the Auto Union legacy. Like the Mercedes offering of the time, the D-Type met the challenge of racing with oodles of power but at least the Auto Union engineers made the fight against Alfa Romeo a little fairer by choosing a configuration for the time that made the car almost a death trap!

So, if you have a few million to spare, remember to put your bid in early.

Porsche introduced the 904 in 1964 with the sole purpose of racing. To meet the terms of the homologation rules, they had to build a hundred road-going examples. Such was the demand for the car that they produced twenty more in 1965.

The engine was the inevitable Porsche flat-4, although some of the later cars had the flat-6 and just a few, for racing by the factory team, the flat-8. The car had a fiberglass body and was very light as a result - it won the Targa Florio in 1964 as well as many other races. But the reason I write about it here is that it looked so good; to my eye, it is by far the best-looking Porsche ever built.

Who cares that it is way beyond our reach and probably impractical as a road car? It’s as pretty as a picture and deserves to be remembered. And it was the first step in an evolution that led ultimately to the all-conquering Porsche 917. Now that is progeny to be proud of!