A stunning pre-war Lagonda V12 Drophead Coupe that's been fully restored is coming up for auction
with an estimated price tag of £300,000 to £400,000.
13/01/2020
This stunning pre-war 1939 Lagonda V12 Drophead Coupe will be sold for an estimate of £300,000 to £400,000 at our next sale at Duxford on March 18th 2020.
Quite possibly the finest example on the market today and a real jewel for any collection it was unearthed after forty years' barn storage and subsequently treated to an exhaustive 'chassis up' restoration with input from the likes of LMB Racing, Bishop Gray and Mel Cranmer.This Lagonda was the most technologically advanced motor car to come out of Britain pre-WW2. A Lagonda press release from August 1937, states: 'Of the half-dozen patrician motor cars still remaining on the world market, none ever inherited such a rich patrimony of design as the 12-cylinder Lagonda. The new car is no mere recapitulation of a good - but tired - design in terms of 1937. It is a new-born car, unrelated to any yet on the road - here or on the Continent. New ideals of performance were set up and these have been exceeded in the sheer versatility of the new car. Such is the 12-cylinder Lagonda - a car destined to rank from now on, among the greater names in motoring history'.
'In making an evaluation of the better British cars, the Lagonda V12 certainly must be considered an excellent design and one that contributed to raising the state of the art - not forgetting, of course, that it probably should be considered W O Bentley's masterpiece'. (Road & Track, October 1978).
The most technologically advanced and ambitious motorcar to come out of Britain pre-WW2, the Lagonda V12 had few international peers. Bugatti's Type 57 may have boasted a similarly exotic overhead camshaft powerplant but its chassis layout was positively archaic by comparison. Mercedes-Benz's 540K could match the British car's power output but only when its refinement-compromising supercharger was engaged, while Hispano-Suiza's J12 needed over twice the cubic capacity to develop an extra forty horsepower! A landmark design, the Lagonda will forever be notable as the world's first production car to feature an overhead camshaft V12 engine.
