Elite Traveler Summer 2023

LEADERS IN LUXURY MOTORING

Continuation cars As luxury automobile manufacturers race toward new technologies —

handful of brands making them, could not be more di ff erent. Jaguar’s C-Type, Bentley’s Speed Six and Superformance’s (then-Ford's) GT40 — all iconic, period-speci fi c race cars that won Le Mans — are being rebuilt, reborn and reintroduced. Land Rover’s Series I, meanwhile, combines chassis restoration with a ground-up rebuild. Critics call it a marketing grab, but consider this: Last year one of only two Mercedes-Benz 1955 300SLR Uhlenhaut coupes sold at auction for $143m — the most expensive auto price ever fetched under a gavel. For active and interested collectors, it’s impossible to accumulate cars if there aren’t any to purchase. While each brand continues to implement its continuation strategy and construction di ff erently, a common thread links the quartet — the desire for these fabled cars to have new life, not to mention a fresh audience of enthusiasts.

electri fi cation, sustainable material innovation and carbon neutrality, to name a few — those same brands fervently gaze into their respective pasts. It’sno secret that car companies keep extensive, if not exhaustive, records. Dusted o ff and digitized, those archives now serve as blueprints for what several makers have coined as ‘continuation cars,’ meticulously sourced, in-house constructed (or o ffi cially licensed) and vigorously road-tested vehicles that adhere to the same period speci fi cations, style and assembly as the original models made decades prior. Since the 1950s, motorheads have been tinkering with aftermarket replicas and kit cars — inexpensive, do-it-yourself copies of legendary vehicles: Think: Porsche 550 Spyder, Shelby Cobra or MG T-Type. Continuation cars, according to the

by Alexandra Cheney