The $1.5 million Ferrari rusting away in the Arizona desert for half a century. The $2 million Duesenberg parked in a Manhattan garage for 60 years. The $5 million Bugatti forgotten in a British barn for generations. There’s something irresistible about the notion of beautiful machines once capable of setting speed records by tenths of a second sitting motionless and lame, collecting dust for decades.
Few people know that one of the greatest cars Mercedes-Benz has produced in its 125-year history sits on flat tires, covered by 30 years of grime, in an unmarked building in South Central Los Angeles. The 1935 Rudolf Caracciola Mercedes-Benz 500K “Roadster Limousine,” one of the most beautifully struck and elegant prewar cars ever built, was commissioned as a gift for one of the most legendary race car drivers ever to turn the wheel. Based on recent auction figures, the 500K—one of the holy grails of car collecting—could be worth upward of $10 million if it ever came to auction. But it sits nose to tail with scores of other exceedingly rare classic European cars as part of the mind-bogglingly vast inventory of the nondescript Porche (sic) Foreign Auto, an “auto dismantling” operation (junkyard is the more common term), which was founded in 1967 by a guy named Rudi Klein.
Klein, I discovered, was a former butcher from Germany who died in 2001, leaving two sons and a widow. People who knew him told me he was eccentric and gruff in equal parts. He would sic his dog on uninvited visitors—like me—inquiring after his cars. For the most part the business deals in parts, providing ultrarare doors, hardware, and just about anything to highend auto collectors and restorers. (A cease-and-desist letter from Porsche necessitated the unusual spelling.) Porche Foreign Auto is the place you call when you need pristine stock parts for your 1970 Mercedes 280SL, or an impossible-to-find piece of trim for your 1966 911S, or a 1937 Chrysler Airflow C17 fairly intact but needing a tow—just another vehicle to complete your collection.
Today the largely secret automotive hoard is looked after, in a manner, by Klein’s two sons, who seem to regard it as a private collection as much as a family business. Many of the Kleins’ cars have been thought by auto historians and collectors to be lost to time. “They’ve got old cars that people have been looking for for years and have no idea they still exist,” Tom Hanson, the parts manager at the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in Irvine, California, told me. “I’m not at liberty to reveal what they are. I promised I’d just kinda keep hush about that.”
The first couple of times I stopped by Porche Foreign Auto, I was gently shooed away. “There’s a whole big story with that car,” Klein’s son Jason, a 35-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair, said of the 500K while showing me the heavy-gauge steel door that tends to keep the curious at bay. The building’s Alamo-esque gable only adds to its fortresslike quality. “But you’ve got to ask Ben about that.” Ben, his older brother by a year, declined the opportunity to talk.
So I set about tracking down the very select few who had managed to get a glimpse of the 500K, which has rarely, if ever, been seen since 1980, when Rudi Klein, who had recently become the owner, brought it to a Mercedes-Benz Club show in Newport Beach. When the engine wouldn’t start, he became agitated and loaded the vehicle back into its cargo trailer. It has remained under wraps ever since. Fortunately, a couple of the people I spoke to hadn’t taken the same vow of secrecy as Hanson. I was able to start compiling a rough catalog of what might be hiding in the junkyard behind those steel doors, or at the family’s nearby warehouse: a pair of one-off prewar Maybachs; one of two Iso Grifo Spyders (designed and engineered by Giotto Bizzarrini, who also has the Ferrari 250 GTO on his résumé); one of 29 alloy-bodied Mercedes Gullwings, lighter, faster, and rarer than their steel siblings; a couple of BMW 502s and 507s; a half-dozen or so Lamborghini Miuras, with their mighty V12 engines; and the last surviving example of the seven Horch 855 Spezial Roadsters ever built, a specimen once owned by Eva Braun that was for a time on loan to the Audi Museum in Germany. (Audi was founded by August Horch.) Parked one on top of the other are dozens upon dozens of Porsche Carrera carcasses baking in the Southern California sun, the paint slowly burning off their bodies.
To put it in non-autophile terms, some of the Kleins’ treasures are at the level of a bottle of Thomas Jefferson’s Bordeaux or a double-sided Kandinsky. Bruce Meyer, the 70-year-old Los Angeles–based real estate investor and celebrated car collector—he prefers the term enthusiast—remembers walking into Klein’s ramshackle warehouse, which was surrounded by barbed wire and cacti, and seeing cars worth millions “stacked up like cordwood.” Mike Kunz, head of the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in Irvine, California, has been a client of Porche’s for years, relying on the Kleins for essential parts for museum-worthy cars. He said he felt as if he were in “a strange film noir where all these hyperexotic cars, some of them crashed, are just decaying away.” He tried to find the right words for the experience. “It’s so contra to what those cars are. It’s such an extreme difference to go from beauty and glamour to what they are now, in their decrepitude.”
The story of Rudolf Caracciola, his 500K, and how it ended up collecting dust at Rudi Klein’s shop turns out to be less film noir than spy novel—the kind of yarn Graham Greene might have spun had he been a gearhead. It begins in 1901, when Caracciola was born in the west of Germany. He would grow to be a tall, broad-faced man whose racing prowess forever changed the sport and whose life story changed the very idea of what a race car driver was. Prior to World War II, racing in both Europe and America was the pastime of gentlemen with deep pockets—and, more often than not, head traumas. Caracciola’s parents were hotel keepers, and his ancestors had emigrated from Italy. Rather than attending college, he apprenticed at a car factory. Later he worked as a car salesman for Daimler in Dresden. (Imagine modern-day Formula One wunderkind Michael Schumacher getting his start hawking Ferraris out on the lot.)
Caracciola hustled his way into his first major race, which happened to be the first running of the German Grand Prix at the Automobil Verkehrs und Ubungs Strasse racing circuit in Berlin. It was 1926, and Mercedes-Benz, then newly created from Daimler and Benz, was eager to increase its exports on the continent. It decided to send its official factory racing team to the Spanish Grand Prix. But the 25-year-old Caracciola asked the company for a shot and a car for the German race, which was generously provided—as long as he drove as an independent and not a team racer. More than 230,000 fans watched as the green flag dropped and Caracciola stalled. By the time his “riding mechanic” got the Benz started again (and rode shotgun in what had to be one of the most severely underpaid positions of the day), Caracciola was in last place and more than a minute behind. Then it started to rain—heavy, German rain. Driver safety doesn’t appear to have been on the race organizers’ minds. One driver crashed into the timekeeper’s box, killing the three marshals inside. Others, unable to see through the dense fog and slashing downpour, retired. But Caracciola kept racing. By the time he finished the final lap, he had no idea where he placed. In fact, he’d won. The Germans called him Regenmeister: Rain Master.
For much of the 1930s, Grand Prix racing, which later evolved into Formula One, was dominated by Mercedes-Benz. The maker’s Silver Arrows (so dubbed because their bodies were unpainted aluminum) and supercharger technology marked the transformation of race cars from heavy, fast, and dangerous to light, incredibly fast, and insanely dangerous. And the driver who could make the Silver Arrow do things never before imaginable was Rudi Caracciola. He would go on to win six German Grand Prix trophies (a record that stands to this day; Schumacher notched “only” four firsts) en route to three European Driving Championships and three European Hillclimb Championships. In 1931, in one of his most awe-inspiring victories, the former car salesman outdrove a pack of Alfa Romeos to become the first foreigner to win the Mille Miglia, the grueling thousand-mile trek up and down Italy.
Caracciola’s biggest triumph may have occurred on January 28, 1938. When that day began, the world speed record was held by Auto Union, a conglomeration of four German manufacturers that had joined forces as a means to survive the Great Depression, later evolving into Audi. Mercedes-Benz wanted the record. Auto Union was to Mercedes-Benz what the Boston Red Sox are to the New York Yankees. As the challenger, Caracciola went first. He squeezed his tall frame into a mirror-polished W125 Rekordwagen and set off across 20 miles of a newly paved highway called the Autobahn, between Frankfurt and Darmstadt. With spectators lining the road, Caracciola was clocked at 268.9 miles per hour. Later that afternoon his longtime friend and rival Bernd Rosemeyer had his turn. Rosemeyer—known as the Silver Comet—took off in gusty conditions. His Auto Union Streamliner careered out of control at 250 mph and went airborne, flying more than 200 yards through the air. The 28-year-old Rosemeyer was killed. His body was found on the roadside, supposedly not a mark on it. Mercedes-Benz—and Caracciola—took home the record, which, 74 years later, remains the fastest speed ever recorded on a public road.
As Mike Kunz told me, the Caracciola era marks “the beginnings of real speed. There was no limit. Formula One today is all regulated and controlled—and rightfully so, to protect the drivers—but there was none of that back then.” As for Caracciola’s mettle, “You had to be a different breed of person, who was seeking the boundaries of something. Because you were practically sitting on top of a bomb.” Caracciola and his Grand Prix compatriots were the automotive version of Tom Wolfe’s astronauts in The Right Stuff. They pushed the boundaries not just of courage but of physics.
The continent’s nationalistic governments were busy stoking the growing mania for European Grand Prix racing. When Caracciola set the new speed record, it was after Adolf Hitler had declared that he wanted a German to do it in a German car on German soil—a kind of Nazi moonshot to show the world the Third Reich’s technological superiority. But Caracciola refused to become an active member of the Nazi party. He never did think too highly of the Führer. Recalling an occasion in 1931 when he was made to personally deliver a Mercedes-Benz 770 limousine (the marque’s most expensive car at the time) to Hitler, Caracciola later wrote in his autobiography, “I could not imagine that this man would have the requirements for taking over the government some day.”
In 1935 Mercedes-Benz presented its one-off two-seater—the 500K—to Caracciola. The car was technically a prototype made with him in mind, with a taller windshield to accommodate his height. The 500K would become Caracciola’s personal vehicle, a smooth ride away from the racetrack, a glamorous rolling advertisement for the greatness of Mercedes-Benz. A photograph shows Caracciola and the 500K together in 1937. He’s leaning against the car’s sweeping front fender with his close friend Alfred Neubauer, the legendary manager of the Mercedes Grand Prix team. The men are wearing wool suits and overcoats and standing in front of a ship moored in the port town of Bremerhaven. They’re about to set off for Long Island to run in the George Vanderbilt Cup at Roosevelt Raceway, America’s first international road race. (Caracciola’s Mercedes-Benz W125 would blow a supercharger, and he would retire after 17 laps, finishing in 24th place.)
It’s unclear exactly when or why Caracciola and the 500K parted ways, but it is known that the car made the journey back across the Atlantic, because the next place it pops up is at a luxury auto dealership in Paris on the eve of World War II. There it was purchased by Benito Mussolini as a present for his overachieving son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister who had recently helped give Il Duce his new colony of Ethiopia. Time magazine said of him, “This amiable and rather plump young man has had difficulty in acquiring the mien of his father-in-law the Dictator, but has now learned to frown almost without visible effort.”
During Ciano’s custodianship, the D (for Deutschland) on the 500K’s rear fender was replaced with an I (for Italy). But Ciano didn’t enjoy the car for long. As Italy suffered through World War II, Ciano voted, with others, to remove Mussolini from power. Mussolini naturally took offense and prepared another gift for his son-in-law. After escaping from captivity with the help of a Nazi air raid, the dictator had Ciano tried for treason. A firing squad shot him in the back in Verona on January 11, 1944.
Stashed away for the duration of the war, the 500K proved to be more of a survivor than its owner. But where does one hide a nearly 20-foot-long, 6,000-pound luxury car from marauding scavengers of war? Apparently Ethiopia, where it was covered in tarpaulins and hidden in a manure pile. “It’s incredible what you can sometimes find in a pile of crap,” Tom Hanson said when we discussed this improbable twist. How then did the 500K ever find its way back to the United States?
Sometime in the early 1960s, a few years before Rudi Klein, who had emigrated from Germany to Canada and then to the United States, would open Porche, Dr. Milton Roth, a dentist and well-known Bugatti collector from Long Beach, California, bought the 500K at auction. But soon after he had it shipped from Ethiopia, he died. The car changed hands a couple more times, staying in the area, until it was bought by a Rolls-Royce collector named Bill Post, who in 1965 brought it to Dale Hanson, a restorer specializing in luxury cars and the father of Tom Hanson. The 500K was now in less than primo shape. “The guys in the shop thought I’d gone mad,” the elder Hanson, now 85, remembers. “It took two flatbed trucks to hold all the parts of this big, ugly thing. You couldn’t even tell it was a Mercedes unless you got up real close.” Understanding the value of the car and its extraordinary history, he spent the next 16 months restoring it, from nose to tail. “I worked a lot of weekends and nights and did things that you normally don’t do, because I had an idea that this car was one that would be more than desirable,” he says. “Turns out that it is.”
Hanson stubbornly insisted that the 500K be restored as close to its original state as possible, often to the chagrin of its owner, who was known to exhibit a weakness for goldplated engine parts and wild color schemes. This, after all, was the era of hot rods, kustom kulture. Hanson got hold of the original build sheet for the car. (“The commissioning papers were signed, in very readable writing, by Hitler.”) He also found a compartment under the driver’s seat that had never seen the sun, which, when he opened it, revealed the car’s original color: a deep maroon. The leather seats had been painted black, but he found the original light biscuit color in the crease of a fold and had matching upholstery made. Even the tire treads had to be refabricated, although Dale did update their style. “It looks a lot better with whitewalls—believe me.”
As soon as the restoration was complete, the 500K was entered in the 1966 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance—the Westminster of classic car shows. It wowed the audience, finishing second in its class to a 1931 Bugatti that went on to win Best of Show. Everyone who saw it that day knew: Dale Hanson’s restoration had brought a German ghost back to life. Its deep maroon skin radiated against the rye grass of Pebble Beach Golf Links’ 18th fairway, and its elegant, flowing lines echoed those of the cove behind it. Like Caracciola, the 500K would collect nearly enough trophies and blue ribbons to fill a garage during its years on the show circuit. The last time the car was entered at the Pebble Beach Concours, in 1978, Hanson’s restoration was nearly 13 years old, an unheard-of handicap. Under the new ownership of James Packer, it won Best in Class. Then Rudi Klein—a bit of an outcast in collecting circles but known as a wily businessman with a nose for a good find—paid an unknown amount to own the 500K, and, soon enough, the car was never seen in public again.
Last August I went to the 61st Annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, thinking I might learn more about the 500K. The weekend was more of a blowout than usual, a grand celebration of Mercedes-Benz, the featured marque, as well as the 125th anniversary of the automobile. The only thing as eye-popping as the competing cars—which still line up along the 18th fairway—is the prices they fetch at the winefueled auctions. The high point last year took place under the RM Auction tent (RM being the largest collector-car auction house in the world), where five Mercedes-Benzes from the 1930s were on the block. All were eight-cylinder Kompressor (supercharged) models, like the 500K. Only a couple of hundred, total, ever left the factory in Germany. One Spezial Coupe, a 1936 540K, was even painted maroon. It sold for more than $3 million. A 1937 540K Spezial Roadster went for a whisker under $10 million, setting a world record for a Mercedes-Benz sold at auction.
Mike Kunz thinks the Caracciola 500K is worth still more. “There are individuals who would pay crazy money for a piece of history, and this is a piece of history,” he told me. “With the correct confirmation of facts and proof, which we have, the 500K could be a more valuable car than that Spezial Roadster.” That would make it one of the most expensive cars ever auctioned. But Kunz, who has actually viewed the 500K with the Kleins, is quick to point out that the car, ultimately, transcends dollars. “I don’t even care about the value. It’s about the piece of history and preserving it. And honoring it. The value is a secondary thing for us as car guys.” Elaborating on the less than ideal conditions the car now likely finds itself in, Kunz added, “At some point there will be an earthquake or a fire, and that’ll be the end of it. And I just think that’s terrible. Terrible. This car doesn’t deserve that.”
After the concours, I headed back down to Porche Foreign Auto. I thought I would try the Klein brothers one more time and attempt, once and for all, to get a glimpse of the 500K. The Kleins’ business may be only 350 miles south of Pebble Beach, but really it couldn’t be farther away. It’s about two miles from where the Watts riots took place, in 1965. There are mountains of scrap metal along South Alameda, towers of used tires. A sign shouts “WINDOW TINTING FOR $99.99” next to a mural of the Virgin Mary in the colors of the Mexican flag.
I ring the buzzer. A few moments later Jason Klein appears in the dark doorway. I begin to reintroduce myself, but he cuts me off and says he knows who I am. He’s not as quick to hustle me away this time, but he tells me once again I’ve got to talk to Ben and that Ben’s not there. “I don’t keep his schedule,” he says.
After several unreturned phone calls, Ben finally agrees to answer my questions via e-mail. He’s unfailingly polite in brushing most of them off. As for getting in to see or possibly photograph the 500K, which is apparently housed in an unmarked warehouse separate from the Kleins’ main facility, he doesn’t acknowledge the question. I mention that Jason told me there are many other cars he feels more attached to than the 500K and wonder what his own feelings are toward the car. No answer.
Ten years ago Mercedes tried arranging a loan agreement with the Kleins so the 500K could be displayed—alone in its own room—at the company’s museum in Fellbach, Germany. (Audi had arranged a similar deal with the Kleins for the restoration of the Eva Braun Horch.) But the deal fell apart after Rudi Klein’s death, in 2001, for reasons that remain unclear. Mercedes allegedly offered to do a full restoration, free of charge, an investment of perhaps a few million dollars, for the opportunity. (According to the Kleins, the 500K has a few dings on it but is otherwise in fairly good shape.) “It was the right thing to do with that car,” Kunz says. “I’m hoping at some point we can revisit that.” Dale Hanson knows that with the Caracciola 500K, it’s impossible to say. “Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t.”
I ask Ben Klein what the future might hold for this car, given its storied past. Will it finally make the pilgrimage to the Mercedes-Benz Museum, returning to the country whence it came? Will it wind up for sale and break another auction record? Will it continue to collect dust? Will it eventually crumble away into nothing? He doesn’t give any hint. But he does reveal a telling detail when I ask him if the 500K was the car Rudi Klein, his father, was most proud of. “For sure,” he writes. “He kept a picture of the car in his wallet.” The tough and gruff butcher from Germany had at least one soft spot after all.
