[Historybuff]

I am sure that the barn hunters out there will find Jerry Heasley's new book about RARE FINDS (the one concentrating on Fords) very entertaining. Particularly the chapter about the GT40 that some guy helping out at an auction in Ohio found buried in mud. I have since found other references that say there wasn't that much of the car left, disputing Heasley's story where there is a whole chassis but anyway I wonder if any other GT40 fans have an an opinion on what happened to this car later?


In a nutshell, car racer Salt Walther's mother owned a boat business. The family had an auction company disposing of all the assets and out behind the building, a guy who worked for the auction company discovered the chassis of a GT40. This was left there after someone had tried to start the GT40 years earlier, and only ended up burning down the building with several valuable prewar cars in it. The GT40 was not included in the auction because they couldn't be bothered with some car he thought he saw buried in the dirt (only the top of the engine was visible). According to Heasley, at first the discover thought it was just an engine but dug into the dirt and found suspension arms and realized it was a chassis which was eventually connected to a Salt Walther- owned GT40. The discoverer, according to Heasley, bought the car but later on the Walther family objected that this car was not included in the auction and the discoverer who had bought it separately had to pay all over again for it. (I am more than a little confused because I know a former LA fireman--Dennis Murdoch-- who told me he has the Salt Walther GT40 he bought from Salt while Salt was in the hospital recovering from burns from a racing accident. He still owns that car)


But the story goes on. Other sources say that there wasn't that much there, after all, the car had been buried next to a river for 20 years, but anyhow a a Safir replica-- SN1127--is named as the chassis 1005's number was transferred to.

Now I have been to Safir when they were still in England (bought a car there for a friend) but since the Safir GT40s were made decades after the last GT40 by Ford (not counting the three that Ford had completed from old tubs) I question this re-assigning of numbers. It kind of reminds me of European royalty--say where a "pretender to the throne" (someone considered outside a royal family) ends up somehow being suddenly recognized as royalty when the last legitimate royal heir in the family (like the king or a royal prince) dies.

On the other hand, Safir was licensed by Ford to make their GT40 so others could argue one of their chassis is a legitimate substitute for the real thing. I know that 1005 appeared at an auction, so I'd love to know if--in the auction catalog-- the auction company admitted that the car known as 1005 was once a Safir replica.I still consider any chassis made out of original time sequence (in this case not in the 1960s) to be a replica even though I know that chassis replacement is done from time to time (when I went to Lotus once, they had Esprit chassis to replace those damaged in accidents since it was impossible to straighten out a chassis hit hard).

Also is Salt Walther still alive?

Ironically there is a more historically significant GT40 7 liter targa buried in Calif. but I have to see if there's anything on that,and the last guy I knew who was at the interment just died (Steele Therkelson).