The D8-120 is widely regarded as the last truly great Delage automobile, albeit one produced under their new partnership with onetime rival Delahaye. In fact, the D8-120 was based largely on Delahaye mechanicals, with the exception of its outstanding inline eight-cylinder engine, which was wholly and beautifully Delage. With its distinctive external side exhausts emerging through its long hood, in the fashion of the American Auburn and Cord, the D8-120 was an extraordinary basis for custom coachwork and carried some of the finest examples of its era.

Not least among them is the example offered here, a one-off design with unusually tightly drawn and purely sporting proportions, echoing the great competition Delages of years past. Most significantly, it was built on the very scarce D8-120 S platform, the S representing, as with Bugatti, surbaissé or “lowered.” The chassis of this model, first debuted at the Paris Salon of 1937, was not only lower but lightened, with a narrower track and slightly larger wheels.

According to Portuguese enthusiast Francisco Aragão Teixeira, the D8-120 S was originally owned by Fernando Tavares de Carvalho, a noted lawyer in Lisbon and onetime mayor of Sintra; the car’s build sheet, supplied to the current owner by the renowned coachwork historian Richard Adatto, records completion of the chassis on 13 March 1938. That same day it entered the workshop of the renowned coachbuilders Letourneur et Marchand, perhaps the foremost carrossier on Delage chassis.

The build records of Letourneur et Marchand, supplied by historian Daniel Cabart, recount that the car was completed in June of 1939 with body number 2990, identified as a two-door, four-passenger cabriolet. Mr. Adatto firmly believes that the car, based upon its construction, was nonetheless actually completed as a coupe; in any instance the car has been finished to its present configuration for its entire known history, and so it is likely that any conversion work actually occurred in-period. Black-and-white photographs in the file, apparently taken in the 1940s or 1950s, show the car much as it appears today.

Several subsequent Portuguese owners are recorded by registration history included in the file, extending through the pre-war years until well into the 1950s. In 1976 the car was found in Portugal by broker Fred Yhap, who acquired it from Acaveda. Shortly thereafter Yhap sold the car to the Honorable Patrick Lindsay, a noted British enthusiast, who was enthralled with the acquisition but upon delivery realized that he did not fit behind the wheel. It was sold on and shortly acquired by Ares Emanuel, who at the time was quietly building an impressive, carefully curated collection of classics that were stored in London.

The collection was sold en masse in 1983 to Don Williams of The Blackhawk Collection, who shortly sold the Delage to West Coast collector Stu Bewley, for whom it was restored by Stuart Laidlaw in metallic blue with additional chrome trim accenting the curves of the fenders. In this form the car was pictured in Automobile Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 2. It went on to be exhibited, again under Blackhawk auspices, at the 1990 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

Later, in the early 1990s, it was acquired by a Japanese collector, a Mr. Mansuri, with whom it remained until being sold to Jim Patterson in 2001. Afterward it was extensively freshened by RM Auto Restoration, including being refinished to the preferred Patterson “black-and-tan” livery with its mechanical systems rebuilt as necessary to ensure that it would be a ready concours entrant. It returned to Pebble Beach in 2009, where as an exhibition-only entrant it nonetheless received the Elegance in Motion Trophy. In 2013 it received Best of Show at The Elegance at Hershey, followed by Best of Show at the Keeneland Concours in Mr. Patterson’s hometown of Louisville.

An extraordinarily beautiful Delage, offered now from a full quarter-century in one of North America’s most prestigious collections of French coachwork, this is genuinely one of the most special D8-120s remaining in existence.