Rennwagen, damals
George Burianu must have been an exciting character. Born on 20 August 1901 in Braila, in the depths of Wallachia, he apparently emigrated to Italy at the age of 16. There he met, so the story goes, Felice Nazzaro, who at the time was the fastest man in the world, held almost every speed record of those years and also won the Targa Florio twice, who advised the young Romanian to try his luck in Belgium. Belgium, why Belgium, you may ask, but Burianu, meanwhile probably more Georges Bourianou, found employment at Minerva, a once famous manufacturer of motorcycles and luxury vehicles. Bourianou was possibly a gifted engineer, but in any case he was a talented racing driver who was able to afford a used Bugatti Type 35C in 1929 – and promptly took second place in the first Monaco Grand Prix. In the autumn of 1929, he was offered a new Type 35B by Ettore Bugatti at a ‘very special price’, #4947, with which he competed again in Monte Carlo in 1930, but had to retire after a somewhat more intimate encounter with a sandbag. Bourianou drove a few more races with #4947, had a bad crash, technical problems, animals on the road, burning carburettors, in fact all the problems that racing drivers had back then.



In 1934, the Romanian, who had since settled in Waterloo, later served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, boosted the sale of Land Rovers in Belgium after World War II and died in 1996 at a ripe old age, sold his Bugatti to a competitor, the Belgian Arthur Legat. He was much more successful with the Type 35B, christened ‘La Boule II’, winning a few road and hill climbs (hill climbs in Belgium…), before selling the car to Pierre Vingerhoedts, who gave the Bugatti a more streamlined body and entered it in races until 1949. In 1956, the Bugatti came across the Atlantic to Colonel George S. Felton, better known as ‘Fearless Felton’, via the Dutch dealer Jean de Dobbeleer. The question now is in what configuration this Type 35B was at the time, what was still original. Felton had the car restored (or perhaps it would be better to say rebuilt) – and after his death in 1959, the car came into the hands of Anton ‘Tony’ Hulman Jr., the founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, where #4947 has had a comfortable home for the past 65 years. RM Sotheby’s, where the vehicle will be auctioned at the end of February 2025, assumes that the frame, engine, transmission housing, fuel tank and rear axle are still original, while in many other areas contemporary original parts from Bugatti were used, while instruments, carburettors and brakes, for example, were probably replaced by third-party products in the 1950s. This is typical work that has to be carried out on a racing car that is almost 100 years old.


















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