Michael Satterfield
On my recent motorcycle road trip with BMW, we stopped to visit to the Wheels Through Time Museum in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. While touring the museum I ran across a car I had seen several years ago when it was auctioned off as part of the Lee Roy Hartung collection, a very unique BMW. The car was constructed in 1949 for an American Airforce pilot living in Germany by Carosseriebau Hermann Spohn, using a Veritas sports car chassis and a BMW 6-cylinder engine sourced from a 328. The design was unconventional but if you look closely you will see where it inspired the Jet-Age cars of Harley Earl just a few years later.
The vintage photos below show the car has it was in 1957 at the Indianapolis Motor Show, the story behind the wild Zebra interior is that the owner brought the skins back from a hunting trip in Africa and had the interior upholstered with them at Spohn. Today the car sits unrestored in the Wheels Through Time Museum collection, one of the only non-US built vehicles housed at the museum.
