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"Hideously expensive important race cars are almost common today, which makes a kind of sense. They generally weren&amp;#039;t used in the top level of competition very long, so during a given season any particular driver was likely to have driven several cars. It doesn&amp;#039;t need to have been a widely famous driver, either. Just competing at Le Mans or in the Targa Florio, or being part of a famous team like  Ecurrie Ecosse  is often enough to see a car preserved and highly valued.  The bread-and-butter daily cars of the great drivers tend to be much less common, and much less interesting. In the factory driver era\u2014which has been going on for about 110 years now\u2014they tend to be from the manufacturer and treated disposably, exchanged for a new model every year or two, after which they disappear into the used car stream. In fact, while off the top of my head I can name a dozen significant race cars sold in the last few months, this is the first driver&amp;#039;s personal car I&amp;#039;ve ever been interested in.    Juan Fangio  helped put IKA, which was a distant Kaiser/Willys subsidiary, on the map. Not only did he originally help hook them up with his friend Battista &amp;quot;Pinin&amp;quot; Farina, but long after his retirement from driving he was part of the management of a IKA/Renault team at at the 1969 N\u00FCrburgring 84-hour (yes, eighty-four hour) race. The IKA Torinos finished extremely well and IKA gave Fangio a new 1970 380S Torino as a thank you. While there&amp;#039;s more than a little AMC Rambler underneath, there&amp;#039;s Pininfarina styling on the outside and a version of the Rambler&amp;#039;s 230-cu.in. straight six underhood. Argentines really like these cars, and Fangio drove his until 1974, when he became President of Mercedes-Benz Argentina and loaned it semi-permanently to his brother-in-law. It stayed titled in Fangio&amp;#039;s name until his death in 1995; since then, his family has kept it under wraps.   They have now consigned it  to Silverstone Auctions  , which will be selling it at their NEC Classic Motor Show auction in Birmingham, UK, on November 15. They have no reserve and no estimate and honestly, I have no clue what it will sell for. It&amp;#039;s not a race car and it&amp;#039;s not like everyone had posters of Fangio and his Torino on their walls in the Seventies. On the other hand, the only traces of Fangio in his old race cars are photos\u2014this has his old seat covers, receipts and ... troll dolls, apparently, still littering the interior. OK, probably his brother-in-law&amp;#039;s troll dolls. If you love the driver and not how you look to your millionaire friends, you could make a serious case for this car, because owning it in this condition would be like getting a beater from your old uncle Juan. And if you&amp;#039;re both a millionaire and love the driver, another Fangio car  brought about $30 million  earlier this year, which means that somewhere there&amp;#039;s a second bidder with $29 million they didn&amp;#039;t spend. This is how cheap cars can end up being very, very expensive. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a5668/argentine-ika-torino/>