[B]RADFORD — Back before the middle of the 20th century, luxury autos and race cars were built for performance and style, with elite buyers in mind.
The value of those cars has soared over the years, and nowadays they drive a huge international business in restoration, maintenance, sales and competition. At any given time, part of that business is going on in the upper Connecticut River Valley, at Sargent Metalworks, where Scott Sargent has about $40 million worth of cars under his roof.
Sargent and three employees work to maintain, document and restore cars as closely as possible to the way they looked and felt when they were created, in some cases by hand. The 26-year-old company specializes in pre-WWII French exotic cars including Delahaye, Talbot, Hispano, Delage and Bugatti.
It’s the latter that dominate the floor of the 12,000-square-foot space. Sargent is restoring his own 1930 Type 40 Grand Sport Bugatti, a touring car that was also used for racing, and he fondly describes his decades of work on dozens of others.
“I kill myself to save an original part,” said Sargent, as he led a tour in early June around the cars, some nearly 100 years old, in various stages of restoration. “The original part is the soul and the integrity of the car. If we have to make a piece, whether it’s machine work or a body panel, we do it in the same exact way they would have done it in the factory.”
Bugatti, located in the Alsace region of France, is a storied century-old car company that’s still going strong. This year, at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show, Bugatti sold the world’s most expensive new car, La Voiture Noire, for more than $14 million (nearly $19 million after tax).
Sargent’s relationship with the French-made Bugatti began with car collector and Dartmouth-Hitchcock neurologist Peter Williamson of Lyme, New Hampshire, in 1993. Williamson had 14 Bugattis, the largest collection in the world, Sargent said. Williamson had a couple of Maseratis and Ferraris, too.
“He heard about me somehow and came up and found me in my garage, and he said, ‘Hey, I want you to come see my Bugattis,’” Sargent said. “I said, ‘What the hell is a Bugatti?’”
Williamson hired Sargent to maintain and restore his cars for him, and the two ended up taking Williamson’s 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic to Pebble Beach, an annual charitable event for the world’s foremost car collectors, where the Atlantic won the coveted Best in Show prize in 2003. It was Sargent’s first time showing a car there.
That car, which Sargent said is worth $100 million, is now a centerpiece in the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, California; the only other one in existence, he said, is owned by Ralph Lauren.
Sargent’s shop looks like a shrine to the French automaker, including an elaborate cabinet made by Carlo Bugatti, father of Ettore Bugatti the automaker and himself an award-winning Milanese artist and designer at the turn of the century. A customer gave Sargent the cabinet, he said.
Sargent knows the provenance of every Bugatti under his roof and has a personal relationship with many of the owners, some of them ultra-wealthy.
“Everybody I work for is a billionaire,” Sargent said. “They fly into the airport in their jet and then they fly up in helicopters and land in my parking lot.”
The shop is a member of the American Bugatti Club, which keeps a registry of every Bugatti in the United States, Sargent said. He’s acquainted with them all. It also lists each vehicle’s history, including the names of owners and restorers.
“My name is in there maybe 30 times,” Sargent said. “I know every car by serial number, pretty much.”
Sargent, 58, grew up in Fairlee accompanying his father to auto auctions and helping him restore pre-World War II Ford V8s. He still owns a vehicle that his family acquired when he was 8. He was always mechanically inclined, and after getting a degree in business at the University of Arizona he gravitated quickly toward his own shop and the restoration business.
The work with Williamson’s collection led Sargent straight into the very high end of the business, working with automobiles that were produced for the ultra rich to begin with. Some, like a dark blue Bugatti Type 57SC that was built in 1937 and is undergoing restoration on the floor now, are very rare: only 17 of that body style were made. It was one of the most expensive cars available even in 1937, Sargent said, estimating its value now at $12 million to $15 million.
Sargent spends a lot of time on the road traveling to car rallies and other events. He also works as a specialist with the classic car auction house Gooding & Co., where he assists auction buyers at places like Pebble Beach, where the company does about $135 million in sales each year.
As a specialist for Gooding, Sargent can act as a buyer’s agent and also give advice on specific vehicles.
At his shop, Sargent’s goal is to restore the car as closely as possible to the original. If he has to make a part himself, he makes sure it’s identical to the one it’s replacing. He works with a slew of other companies on the details, sending out parts to be plated in chrome at one company in Massachusetts and in silver cadmium at another. The fine leather seats and cloth covers are made by the Vermont company Richmond Auto Upholstery. He’ll research paint colors and leather textures to match what the interior was wearing when the car rolled out of the factory. He puts tempered glass in the windows.
“If you can have over 80% of the original skin or parts, that is double thumbs up,” he said.
Crash-testing, aerodynamics and efficiency weren’t a priority when the cars on Sargent’s floor were designed. Thanks to decades of research on safety, emissions and comfort, modern cars are cleaner, safer and more user-friendly than ever before. But they’re all starting to look alike.
Sargent, who has three BMW 2002s from the early 1970s among his 10 cars, doesn’t have anything against modern cars. But he readily admits their limitations.
“There are some beautiful cars that are made today, but they tend to be super expensive — the race cars, the Ferraris, the new Bugattis, the McLarens,” he said. “Then there are all the rest, what we kind of drive. They all look the same.”
Life isn’t all pre-war works of art for Sargent. He also helped his client Charlie Nearburg break a land speed record by averaging 414 miles per hour in his ultra-modern vehicle, Spirit of Rett, at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah a decade ago.
“It’s like a ground-based missile,” he said of that car.
Cars that Sargent restored have won Best in Class at Pebble Beach three times and he said he’s been in contention for Best of Show at the California show more than once. His goal is to preserve the cars without removing the signs left by the craftsmen who worked on them the first time around.
“The French cars have this organic stature about them, just the way they were made,” he said. “I’m a purist; I’m crazy about putting the car back to its original configuration.” That means leaving inconsistencies in place.
“The bodies are certainly hand-made and we can see major differences from one side of the car to the other side,” he said. Some restorers, he said, will fix those imperfections. He doesn’t approve.
“It’s not my job to wash away what these French people did when they built that car in 1938,” he said. “Leave that alone.”
Sargent also wants these lovingly restored cars to spend time on the road. His clients are often reluctant to take a vehicle out after spending a million dollars on it.
“These cars are not really made to sit static,” he said. “The biggest problems we see in half the cars in my shops are problems because they weren’t used.”