In the newest Heasley book of Rare Finds, which I am doing a review on later when I find an appropriate venue, I was intrigued by the tale of a GT40 found out behind an auction barn sale. Apparently the guy who discovered it worked for the auction company and it was not included in the auction because they couldn't be bothered with some car he saw buried in the dirt. At first he thought it was just an engine but dug into the dirt and found suspension arms and realized it was a chassis which was eventually uncovered as a Salt Walther owned GT40. Later on the family selling the contents of the barn objected that this was not included in the auction and the discoverer who had bought it separately had to pay all over again for it. I was a little confused because I know a former LA fireman who told me he has the Salt Walther GT40. Maybe there's two of them. As far as I know he still has it--bought it from Salt while Salt was in the hospital recovering from burns from a racing accident.
Thanks for the reference but the trail grows murkier In the forum you refer to, one run by a GT40 club , it has one letter writer saying there wasn't that much there, after all, the car had been buried next to a river for 20 years, but anyhow implies that a Safir replica was obtained, SN1127, and the 1005 number transferred to that. This is kind of like a "pretender to the throne" (outside a royal family) somehow being recognized as royalty when someone important in the family (like the king or a royal prince) died. So I hope that if it appears at an auction as 1005 the auction company dutifully reports that the car known as 1005 has a checkered past. It might not exactly be an "air car" though because even the Safir cars had a license from Ford to be produced and sold as GT40s but I still consider any chassis made out of original time sequence (in this case not in the 1960s) to be a replica. And another letter writer speculated on accident prone Salt Walther--is he still alive? Ironically there is a more important GT40 7 liter targa buried in Calif. but I'll start a separate thread on that
