The Car Auburn Needed People to Talk About
Next week in Hershey, Pennsylvania, one of the most important Auburns ever built will roll across an auction block. It is not simply a 1935 Auburn 851 Supercharged Speedster, already one of the most desirable American cars of the Classic Era. According to RM Sotheby’s and Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club documentation, chassis 851 32050 E is the very first 851 Speedster produced. It carries body number U47-200, supercharger number 1001, an extremely early frame and several details found only on the first handful of cars. RM Sotheby’s expects it to bring between $850,000 and $950,000 when it is offered during the October 7 and 8 Hershey sale. The glamorous machine is arriving at auction nearly 92 years after Auburn desperately needed something exactly like it.
By 1934, Auburn Automobile Company was in trouble. The Depression had devastated the luxury-car market, and the company had invested heavily in a new line styled by Alan Leamy. Sales improved somewhat from the disastrous 1933 season, but not nearly enough. Harold Ames, an executive within E.L. Cord’s automotive empire, reportedly disliked the new Auburn’s appearance and was sent in to help straighten things out. There was no money for a clean-sheet redesign, so Auburn turned to Gordon Buehrig, one of the most gifted American designers of the era, and asked him to make an aging product exciting again.
What Auburn really needed was a halo car, something outrageous enough to pull people into showrooms even if they ultimately drove home in a cheaper sedan. The Speedster became that car.
Gordon Buehrig Made Old Parts Look Like the Future
The great irony of the Auburn 851 Speedster is that one of the most dramatic automobiles of the 1930s was created partly through thrift.
Auburn still had unused bodies from earlier 1932 and 1933 speedsters sitting in storage. Rather than throw them away, the company reworked roughly the first 50 of the new 851 Speedsters from those leftover shells. Buehrig reshaped the bodies around a cleaner hood line, vee-shaped windshield, flowing pontoon fenders and a dramatically tapered tail. The result looked expensive, modern and completely intentional, even though the project had been born from financial necessity.
The car coming to Hershey shows just how rapidly the design was still evolving. RM Sotheby’s notes that the first 16 cars used more enclosed front fenders, while only the first four had their chrome exhaust pipes emerging directly through the hood louvers. This car has both features. Its U47-prefix body confirms its origins as one of the earlier repurposed shells, while supercharger number 1001 makes it an especially fascinating artifact from the opening moments of production.
The Speedster also had the performance to support the styling. Its Lycoming-built 280-cubic-inch straight-eight produced about 115 horsepower in naturally aspirated form. A Schwitzer-Cummins centrifugal supercharger raised that to 150 horsepower, serious output for an American road car in 1935. Power flowed through a three-speed manual transmission to a Columbia dual-ratio rear axle. This effectively gave the driver high and low ranges, selectable from a switch on the steering wheel. The gleaming external exhaust pipes were not just decoration. They announced to anyone standing nearby that this Auburn had the blower.
Auburn even installed a plaque on the dashboard bearing the signature of speed-record driver Ab Jenkins. Why? It claimed the car had been driven beyond 100 mph before delivery. Individual production cars were not actually subjected to such treatment, but the boast was grounded in reality. Jenkins had demonstrated that a stock Auburn Speedster really could exceed 100 mph at Bonneville. In the middle of the Great Depression, Auburn had created a car that looked like money and moved like trouble.
The Most Beautiful Auburn Could Not Save Auburn
That was the tragedy. The 851 Speedster succeeded spectacularly as advertising. It made Auburn look glamorous again, generated headlines and gave the company a machine that could stand alongside far more expensive Duesenbergs, Packards and European performance cars. But spectacle could not repair Auburn’s underlying business problems.
The company had spent much of the previous decade trying to balance luxury-car style with comparatively aggressive pricing. E.L. Cord had transformed Auburn in the 1920s by making unsold cars look fresher and marketing them more aggressively, but by the mid-1930s the broader Cord automotive empire was under increasing financial pressure. Auburn’s 1935 lineup was striking, and the following 852 series continued the formula into 1936, but production soon ended. One of the company’s greatest cars had arrived almost at the moment the company was running out of road.
That history is part of what makes authentic Speedsters so valuable today. These were not merely attractive prewar roadsters. They were the final flourish of a company trying to survive through design and performance.
The market reflects that significance. A genuine 1935 Supercharged Speedster sold for $781,000 at Hershey in 2024. Another brought $852,000 at RM Sotheby’s Miami sale earlier this year, while CLASSIC.COM records a high sale of $1.27 million for an 851 Speedster in 2024. Hagerty currently places a good-condition supercharged 1935 Speedster at roughly $792,000. Against those numbers, the $850,000 to $950,000 estimate for the first example does not look especially wild. Its production significance could make it more desirable than an otherwise comparable car.
This particular Auburn has also lived the sort of life collectors like to see. Its known history reaches back to the early 1950s. Restorer and Auburn authority John Ehresman acquired it in 1986 and had it certified by the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club. Certification chief Paul Bryant noted at the time that its unusual features indicated it was the first 1935 851 Speedster built. RM Auto Restoration later restored the car, and it won the Roy Faulkner Award for Best Auburn at the ACD Club National Reunion as well as a Classic Car Club of America Primary First Prize. More than $15,000 in mechanical and cosmetic work was completed in 2025 and 2026 before its return to market.
A Car Built From Leftovers Became a Million-Dollar Icon
There is something wonderfully American about the Auburn 851 Speedster story. It looks like a car designed without compromise, yet compromise was everywhere. Auburn could not afford an entirely new automobile, so old bodies were reshaped. The company needed more power, so its existing straight-eight was supercharged. It needed attention, so Buehrig gave the car proportions dramatic enough to stop people on the sidewalk. Auburn was trying to manufacture excitement because excitement was one of the few resources it could still afford.
The gamble did not save the company. But the car outlived the crisis that created it.
Today, the 851 Speedster is one of those rare machines that can attract people who know almost nothing about prewar automobiles. The exposed chrome exhaust, impossibly long hood, low windshield and tapering rear make it understandable before anyone reads the specification sheet. It looks fast standing still, which may be the oldest cliché in automotive writing, but few cars justify it better. And the example going to Hershey takes the story back to its beginning.
Before the magazine advertisements, before the Ab Jenkins plaques became part of Auburn folklore, before collectors decided an authentic Speedster could be worth close to a million dollars, somebody at Auburn had to build the first one. That car still exists. Next week, someone gets the chance to own it. Auction Listing
