For sale: Marcel Petitjean's incredible car collection

27. May 2020 Market Insights

Marcel Petitjean’s car collecting strategy could be a lesson to us all. A great enthusiast, Petitjean would watch the value of a model he admired, and when its secondhand value dropped to around a third of its price new, he’d buy one.

He did this whenever he had the funds available, from the late-1960s putting all his savings into cars rather than investing in life insurance, stocks and shares or property. At the time it would have looked like a risky move but of course now we can see that it paid off, avoiding recessions and the worldwide savings and loan scandal – and with the collection now about to be offered for sale with RM Sotheby’s auction house, the full extent of Petitjean’s collection can be seen.

Marcel Petitjean and his collection

With most of the cars, Petitjean would drive and enjoy them for six months to a year, before moving them into a storage facility in his native Strasbourg. His idea was that the collection would be maintained to museum standards, so careful attention was paid to the storage conditions and to preservation of the cars in their original state. Each car was carefully prepared for long-term storage, and from that point frequently cleaned but never started again.

Petitjean did, however, dabble in racing for a short while, showing a real talent to the point that he was invited to co-drive a Porsche 908 with Reinhold Joest in the 1971 24 Hours of Daytona. Though it was a huge honour to be asked, and a mark of how well he’d been performing in his own 1964 Porsche 904 GTS, Petitjean eventually turned it down, due to the high costs involved.

His real ambition, above and beyond the racing, was to create a museum of his collection, but sadly that dream never became reality because Petitjean was unable to find a location that he deemed suitable to display his 140-plus cars. So instead, they remained in the storage facility – and the first glimpse of daylight for some of his finest cars (including the Miura) was to be photographed recently for the forthcoming RM Sotheby’s Online Only: The European Sale featuring the Petitjean Collection.

It’s quite a line-up. The auction house is to offer 96 cars in total from the Marcel Petitjean Collection, representing true highlights of European sports-car history, with Lamborghini, Porsche, Jaguar, Maserati and Bizzarrini all represented, among many others. Most have been in Petitjean’s ownership for decades.

They include cars as diverse as a Bitter CD and a Citroën SM but the true stand-outs are the 1958 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster, one of fewer than 30 examples delivered new with with Rudge wheels (estimated at €800,000 – €1.1m), a 1968 Lamborghini Miura P400, delivered new to France and owned by Petitjean’s for nearly 40 years (estimated at €700,000 – €800,000), and a 1964 Porsche 904 GTS owned by Petitjean since 1991 (€700,000 – €900,000).