1996 Light Car Company Rocket

Offered by Bring a Trailer Auctions | September 2023

Photo – Bring a Trailer

The Light Car Company was founded by Gordon Murray and Chris Craft in England in 1991. They built one model, and it was an amazing one: the Rocket. Production started in 1991, and most had been built by the mid-1990s. This one was started in 1996 but ended up as one of 10 completed by the Craft’s between 2006 and 2009. So it’s titled as a 1996 but wasn’t actually completed until the 2000s.

If you’ve always wanted to drive an open-wheel race car on the street (and didn’t manage to snag this thing), then this is a pretty good alternative. It has tandem seating for two, and the 1.2-liter Yamaha inline-four is mounted out back. That engine also can rev to over 11,000 rpm! For the full F1 experience of course.

Jay Leno has one of these – and there aren’t that many in the U.S. The car was also featured in one of the Gran Turismo games, where it was a hoot to drive hard. Only 50 were built in total, and they’ve become much more expensive than they used to be. This one has plenty of time left to bid, which you can do so here.

1949 Rounds Rocket

Offered by RM Auctions, Boca Raton, Florida, February 25, 2012

This beastly mid-engined Indy car was built by Indy car-building legends Lujie Lesovsky & Emil Diedt for a man named Nathan Rounds, who provided the funding and the original drawing of the car that he modeled after the brilliant pre-war Auto Unions.

Because both Diedt and Lesovsky were busy building their own successful race cars, this car was barely ready for the 1949 Indy 500 where it as entered with Bill Taylor as the driver. He did not qualify. In 1950 both Sam Hanks and Bill Vukovich gave the car a run and failed to make the show. Bill Vukovich was a man among men at Indianapolis and – even though 1950 was his rookie year – if he couldn’t get the car in, there was scarcely hope.

Intrigue: Nathan Rounds was close friends with Howard Hughes and it is suspected that Hughes money was behind the project. After failing to make Indy in 1950 the car was shipped to Beverly Hills where it sat in storage, although it did appear in a Mickey Rooney film in 1949.

Bill Harrah (of course) discovered the car in 1969 and bought it. When his collection was parted out the car was purchased and restored and eventually purchased by the Milhous Collection in 1998.

Here is your chance to purchase a car that was extremely ahead of its time. Indy cars would be front-engined for at least another 10 years and here was this brilliant car that had come along and said “the way of the future” (that’s a Howard Hughes quote from The Aviator).

It features an Meyer-Drake Offenhauser straight-four engine (naturally), making about 350 horsepower. It’s fast too – it was tested at Bonneville after it was completed and was clocked at 140 mph. The no reserve pre-sale estimate is $250,000-$350,000. For the complete catalog description, click here and for the rest of the collection click here.

Update: Sold $275,000.