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Automotive Lifestyle
AUTOS: Rick Hendrick’s Cars Star At Auction
Primo custom Corvettes, handsome originals and a very exotic European sports car at Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach from the NASCAR team owner’s personal collection.
One of the most exotic high-performance cars ever, the 2010 Spyker C8 Spyder is a rare piece of supercar excellence. (Photo: Barrett-Jackson)
This article was written by Rich Taylor for the Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach auction catalog.
Everybody knows the name Rick Hendrick. When your NASCAR teams have won a record 13 championships and your current driver lineup includes Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Kasey Kahne, you’re a national figure. Rick was even the technical advisor on the racing film Days of Thunder. Randy Quaid’s character, a good-guy car dealer who helps out Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall, is loosely based on good-guy car dealer Rick Hendrick.
What most NASCAR fans don’t know is that Rick Hendrick is totally self-made, a poor farm boy who restored his first car, a $250 ’31 Chevy five window coupe, when he was 14. In 1976, at just 26 years old, he sold everything but that Chevy to raise the down payment for a failing dealership in Bennettsville, S.C. Today, Hendrick Automotive Group has more than 80 new car franchises and 6,000 employees in 10 states and sells 100,000 cars a year.
Rick Hendrick recently established two new enterprises that take him back to his roots. The Hendrick Heritage Center is a 58,000-square-foot private museum with over 100 cars on display, including that Candy Apple Red ’31 Chevy coupe that started everything back in 1963. Nearby Hendrick Performance is a 21,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art shop with a staff of nearly 20 experts restoring and customizing cars to NASCAR standards of excellence. As Rick Hendrick says, “If it’s got our name on it, it’s got to be right.”
The five cars Rick Hendrick is de-acquisitioning from his collection offer a unique opportunity to acquire an immaculate vehicle from one of the best-known car enthusiasts in America.
Owning a perfectly restored classic? Brilliant. Being able to casually say, “Oh that, I picked it up from Rick Hendrick.” Priceless.
Click on the lot numbers to see each car in the Barrett-Jackson catalog.
2010 Spyker C8 Spyder SWB convertible (Lot #699) At the Birmingham Motor Show in 2000, Dutch entrepreneur Victor Muller presented a startling new exotic car called the Spyker C8 Spyder. Designed by Maarten De Bruijn, this handbuilt tour de force promptly won many international awards for engineering and design. The C8 was so advanced that more than a decade later, the same basic machine is still in production and still among the highest-performing Supercars in the world.
This 2010 Spyker C8 Spyder from the Hendrick collection shows six actual miles on the odometer and is still covered under Spyker’s new car warranty. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price was nearly $250,000. Every Spyker C8 is obviously rare, but this one can be considered rarer than most. It was ordered with optional Aeroblade magnesium wheels that subtly evoke Spyker’s two-bladed airplane propeller logo, repeated five times to create the strong but lightweight 10-spoke wheels.
Muller’s company is called Spyker in homage to an iconic manufacturer that produced automobiles and aviation powerplants in the Netherlands from 1898 till 1925. The Spyker logo dates back to 1914, with a two-bladed propeller over a wire wheel and the Latin motto “Nulla tenaci invia est via,” which Muller translates as “For the tenacious, no road is impassable.” It’s a charming throwback for a modern Supercar manufacturer.
But there is nothing old-fashioned about Spyker cars. The mid-engine design uses a racing-style space frame created from aluminum sheet and extruded box section aluminum. Body panels are also aluminum, produced by Coventry Prototype Panels in Britain and Karmann in Germany.
Power comes from a 4.2 Liter, 32-valve all aluminum V8 supplied by Audi. It’s rated at 400hp and 345 ft/lb of torque. This is the same award-winning engine used in the Audi R8 and A8, and drives through an advanced six-speed manual transaxle. Brakes are huge four-wheel discs supplied by AP Racing.
The C8 interior is deliberately reminiscent of a classic fighter plane with aviation-style instruments and switchgear. Even the cast pedals and polished aluminum gearshift lever are of a design unique to Spyker. Altogether, the various elements combine to create a blend of luxury, performance and handcrafted individuality that is absolutely unique.
All Spyker C8s built since 2005 are U.S. road legal, but that doesn’t mean you’ll see one in your neighborhood. Annual production has varied from 20 to just under 100. Spyker is very secretive about the total number of cars built, but there can’t be many more than 500 Spykers in the world today.
Given that only a handful of Spyker cars have been imported into the United States and despite this rarity, a Spyker is a surprisingly easy exotic to own. The engine and driveline can be serviced by any Audi dealer, and AP Racing brakes and other suspension components are readily available.
The Spyker C8 Spyder embodies everything you might want in a state-of-the-art exotic: performance, style, luxury and rarity in a design proven through racing, improved over a decade of production and preserved by a famous collector. This is a unique chance to own a virtually brand-new, very unusual work of automotive art.
1957 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible (Lot #660.1) The model year 1957 is considered the pinnacle of postwar American car design, with classic models from every manufacturer. Very few 1957 cars are more collectible than the Corvette. This is the year the legendary 283cid V8 was introduced, along with fuel injection and a four-speed manual gearbox.
The clean single-headlight styling of 1956 was retained, creating a timeless classic produced for only one year. No matter how you analyze it, 1957 is the C1 Corvette of choice. Only 6,246 were sold, which means there will never be enough to go around.
Everybody knows the name Rick Hendrick. When your NASCAR teams have won a record 13 championships and your current driver lineup includes Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Kasey Kahne, you’re a national figure. Rick was even the technical advisor on the racing film Days of Thunder. Randy Quaid’s character, a good-guy car dealer who helps out Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall, is loosely based on good-guy car dealer Rick Hendrick.
What most NASCAR fans don’t know is that Rick Hendrick is totally self-made, a poor farm boy who restored his first car, a $250 ’31 Chevy five window coupe, when he was 14. In 1976, at just 26 years old, he sold everything but that Chevy to raise the down payment for a failing dealership in Bennettsville, S.C. Today, Hendrick Automotive Group has more than 80 new car franchises and 6,000 employees in 10 states and sells 100,000 cars a year.
Rick Hendrick recently established two new enterprises that take him back to his roots. The Hendrick Heritage Center is a 58,000-square-foot private museum with over 100 cars on display, including that Candy Apple Red ’31 Chevy coupe that started everything back in 1963. Nearby Hendrick Performance is a 21,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art shop with a staff of nearly 20 experts restoring and customizing cars to NASCAR standards of excellence. As Rick Hendrick says, “If it’s got our name on it, it’s got to be right.”
The five cars Rick Hendrick is de-acquisitioning from his collection offer a unique opportunity to acquire an immaculate vehicle from one of the best-known car enthusiasts in America.
Owning a perfectly restored classic? Brilliant. Being able to casually say, “Oh that, I picked it up from Rick Hendrick.” Priceless.
Click on the lot numbers to see each car in the Barrett-Jackson catalog.
2010 Spyker C8 Spyder SWB convertible (Lot #699) At the Birmingham Motor Show in 2000, Dutch entrepreneur Victor Muller presented a startling new exotic car called the Spyker C8 Spyder. Designed by Maarten De Bruijn, this handbuilt tour de force promptly won many international awards for engineering and design. The C8 was so advanced that more than a decade later, the same basic machine is still in production and still among the highest-performing Supercars in the world.
This 2010 Spyker C8 Spyder from the Hendrick collection shows six actual miles on the odometer and is still covered under Spyker’s new car warranty. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price was nearly $250,000. Every Spyker C8 is obviously rare, but this one can be considered rarer than most. It was ordered with optional Aeroblade magnesium wheels that subtly evoke Spyker’s two-bladed airplane propeller logo, repeated five times to create the strong but lightweight 10-spoke wheels.
Muller’s company is called Spyker in homage to an iconic manufacturer that produced automobiles and aviation powerplants in the Netherlands from 1898 till 1925. The Spyker logo dates back to 1914, with a two-bladed propeller over a wire wheel and the Latin motto “Nulla tenaci invia est via,” which Muller translates as “For the tenacious, no road is impassable.” It’s a charming throwback for a modern Supercar manufacturer.
But there is nothing old-fashioned about Spyker cars. The mid-engine design uses a racing-style space frame created from aluminum sheet and extruded box section aluminum. Body panels are also aluminum, produced by Coventry Prototype Panels in Britain and Karmann in Germany.
Power comes from a 4.2 Liter, 32-valve all aluminum V8 supplied by Audi. It’s rated at 400hp and 345 ft/lb of torque. This is the same award-winning engine used in the Audi R8 and A8, and drives through an advanced six-speed manual transaxle. Brakes are huge four-wheel discs supplied by AP Racing.
The C8 interior is deliberately reminiscent of a classic fighter plane with aviation-style instruments and switchgear. Even the cast pedals and polished aluminum gearshift lever are of a design unique to Spyker. Altogether, the various elements combine to create a blend of luxury, performance and handcrafted individuality that is absolutely unique.
All Spyker C8s built since 2005 are U.S. road legal, but that doesn’t mean you’ll see one in your neighborhood. Annual production has varied from 20 to just under 100. Spyker is very secretive about the total number of cars built, but there can’t be many more than 500 Spykers in the world today.
Given that only a handful of Spyker cars have been imported into the United States and despite this rarity, a Spyker is a surprisingly easy exotic to own. The engine and driveline can be serviced by any Audi dealer, and AP Racing brakes and other suspension components are readily available.
The Spyker C8 Spyder embodies everything you might want in a state-of-the-art exotic: performance, style, luxury and rarity in a design proven through racing, improved over a decade of production and preserved by a famous collector. This is a unique chance to own a virtually brand-new, very unusual work of automotive art.
1957 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible (Lot #660.1) The model year 1957 is considered the pinnacle of postwar American car design, with classic models from every manufacturer. Very few 1957 cars are more collectible than the Corvette. This is the year the legendary 283cid V8 was introduced, along with fuel injection and a four-speed manual gearbox.
The clean single-headlight styling of 1956 was retained, creating a timeless classic produced for only one year. No matter how you analyze it, 1957 is the C1 Corvette of choice. Only 6,246 were sold, which means there will never be enough to go around.
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