Hitler's favourite driver's Grand Prix car may fetch £5.5M at auction

London, Apr 13 (ANI): A Grand Prix car of one of Hitler's favourite racers is expected to fetch a whopping 5.5 million pounds, when it goes under the hammer later this year.

Touted to be the motorsport equivalent of the "Holy Grail", the 1939 Auto Union D-Type is the only model of the car to have stayed intact to date.

With a rear-mounted 3-litre twin-stage supercharged V12-cylinder engine, the 485bhp vehicle could exceed 200mph.

And galloping on racetracks in the supercar was Hans Stuck, one of an elite group of racers revered by many in Germany under Hitler.

With the war looming over Europe in 1939, Stuck drove the car to place finishes in the EifelRennen race at Nurburg and the French Grand Prix at Reims-Gueux.

"(Stuck profited) constantly and to an astonishing degree from his acquaintance with Adolf Hitler," the Telegraph quoted German motorsports commentator Eberhard Reuss as saying in his book 'Hitler's Motor Racing Battles'.

The Chassis 19, as it came to be known, was one of 13 Auto Unions transported out of Germany by Soviet forces in 1945.

Bonhams has revealed that for 40 years the survival of these cars seemed "little more than unproven myth", and the search for them "regarded as historic motorsport's quest for the holy grail."

While a majority of them were cannibalised for parts, Chassis 19 somehow avoided that fate.

In the mid-1980s, Paul Karassik, a Russian-born American classic car enthusiast, found Chassis 19 intact in Ukraine, and it was later restored by East Sussex-based Crosthwaite and Gardiner.

Bonhams said: "It one of the classic car world's most charismatic machines, and is exquisitely well-restored to running order."

Bonhams and Butterfields at Quail Lodge in Carmel, California will sell the car on August 14. (ANI)