No individual knows where the car in this story has spent all of its 80 years, but we can tell you now that it spent most of 2017 in Villisca, Iowa. A farm town of 1,200 tucked into endless cornfields in the southwest corner of the Hawkeye State, Villisca is best known for an unsolved murder that left a prominent local couple and six children hacked to death during the night of June 9, 1912.

We can tell you about it because the car should be disassembled now. Its components will be headed for restoration work on two continents, and its owners will be relieved of an abiding worry that someone could come and steal it.

It wasn’t an irrational fear. In August, the owners were victims of a crime, though this one is solved. Men the investigators called “tweakers from Missouri” broke into a shop in Villisca and made off with parts, tools and a 1976 50th anniversary Pontiac Trans Am, one of 110 built with a four-speed manual. The Trans Am has been located and returned, but the rest is long gone. Fortunately, the tweakers had no clue that a rusty relic along the back wall was more valuable than a rare “Smokey and the Bandit”-era F-body.

The relic is the ultimate, literal barn find and a potential gold mine. It’s a 1937 BMW 328 factory lightweight run by the Nazis at Le Mans and the Mille Miglia—and it isn’t even the car its owners thought they were buying. They thought they had a coach-bodied coupe built by Veritas—a German marque revered in a small circle as the Porsche that never was—and they do have that, too. The owners are true car folk: a couple of self-described “Budweiser-in-a-can farm boys,” traders who know their way around a Trans Am or a K5 Blazer or a Harley-Davidson but don’t have a lot of experience with prewar European classics or the Pebble Beach set. They’re also students of history, appreciative of great machinery and learning fast

The story here? The hunt, first and foremost. Adventure, mystery and problems to solve. The human bonds that automobiles forge, with a cautionary bit of careful-what-you-wish-for thrown in. Or maybe it’s just a snapshot of everything that we love about cars.

Heath Rodney, left, and Dereck Freshour. Dan Brouillette

The Protagonists. There’s a lot of open space where Dereck Freshour and Heath Rodney grew up. Buildings are few outside of town and vehicles outnumber people. Freshour’s shop is one of the larger buildings in Villisca that isn’t a school.

On a warm September afternoon, it’s strewn inside and out with all kinds of stuff, besides a couple customer cars: the prodigal Trans Am, an early Blazer, a Ford from the 1930s, a couple ’60s Olds Cutlasses, a Datsun 240Z and a ’69 Camaro Z28 that Rodney found at an estate sale in northern Iowa, all destined for freshening and sale, along with a half-dozen custom choppers Freshour has built over the years.

Freshour and Rodney knew each other as kids, as you’d expect in a town of 1,200, but they didn’t become friends until after Rodney tried out for high school football and Freshour, two years ahead, wanted nothing more than to “flatten this punk who showed up for practice.” Shortly thereafter, Freshour gave Rodney an El Camino he’d planned to part out because Rodney needed a car. Rodney hauled the coolers to parties in the cornfields, and by the time Freshour graduated in 1991, they were best friends.

They gravitated toward cars again when it was time to earn a living. Freshour started doing body work and decided to open a shop called Body by Freshour. It prospered doing insurance repair for locals who hit deer—a typically reliable source of business in rural Iowa—and expanded. Then the state’s deer were hit by a natural epidemic that decimated the herd before individuals could be killed by cars. Meanwhile, insurance companies started doing their best to funnel claims to a few captive shops.

To fill the gap, Freshour started repairing cars and flipping them. In 2007, he opened a sales lot in the county seat of Red Oak, northwest of Villisca—a comparative metropolis, with 6,000 residents and a municipal airport, most famous as the hometown of television host Johnny Carson. Freshour also began tuning vintage cars after refresh or restoration. They were often finds Rodney had scouted, from Model As to muscle.

Rodney’s life took a turn in 2011, after Freshour phoned to tell him deputies were enforcing a liquidation order at the Harley-Davidson store where they checked out bikes as teenagers. Potential replacement owners were avoiding the store like the plague—based largely on its location in a speck of a town called Pacific Junction, off the beaten path south of Council Bluffs, Iowa—but Rodney knew the lay of the land. He knew the store sat in the shadow of the scenic Loess Hills butted against the Missouri, that there was great riding along the river and that it wasn’t far from the interstate. He saw its potential as a destination. So Rodney persuaded another dealership in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he’d sold cars while attending South Dakota State, to back him financially. He bought the Pacific Junction store and changed the name to Loess Hills Harley-Davidson. Three years later, sales had grown from fewer than five new and used bikes a month to more than 100, and Loess Hills ranked in the top 10 percent of Harley franchises.

Buyers were now champing at the bit for a shot at Loess Hills, so Rodney and his backers sold. Today he’s back in Sioux Falls at Vern Eide Motorcars, with multiple brand franchises in Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota, including the Indian dealer in Sturgis. He consults with struggling dealerships on how to turn things around and treks regularly to Villisca and around the Plains and Midwest, looking for vintage cars and bikes to keep or turn. He has an assistant to help with the legwork, but the sense is he doesn’t do it for the money.

“That’s probably right,” Rodney says. “Dereck and I have tried a lot of shit together, starting in high school, and some of it’s worked. We had a trucking business for a while, and a bar and grill that went well, until we got tired of it. The thing that hasn’t changed is the cars. It’s the history, the digging, like an archaeologist or something. It’s an addiction, though I don’t think we’ve tried a drug like the one we’re dealing with now.”

Freshour is still the hands-on guy in this pairing. Rodney is the sales/promo/marketing guy. Freshour jokes that Rodney has gotten his hands dirty only twice since high school. Once was pulling the Veritas 328 out of a barn.

The Find. In late 2016, a farmer from the next county over walked onto the lot in Red Oak. He remembered Freshour because he’d purchased a Model A the Villiscan had taken to an auction in Illinois a few years prior. The farmer said he was getting up in years and putting his affairs in order, and he wondered if Freshour might be interested in a really unusual car he’d stashed decades ago. Freshour called Rodney and went for a look.

The farmer bought the car in December 1971, from one Robert Luther Good of Council Bluffs, simply because he’d never seen anything like it. He towed it with his tractor and moved it into his barn with a hay bailer, and it didn’t move again for 45 years. It was buried under farm implements and odds and ends when Freshour and Rodney checked it out, full of the bones of raccoons who got in but couldn’t get out. It had been there before the high school buddies were born, one county away.

The two came to terms with the farmer and pulled the car out on Jan. 7, 2017. They weren’t exactly sure what they were buying, but they knew it was cool and definitely a mystery. The title—a replacement issued in 1966—said it was a 1950 BMW Veritas.

“The car was just sort of magnetic,’’ says Freshour. “This one, we never intended to sell—at least not until we’d seen it through to the finish. What we had was a mystery.”

Back at Freshour’s shop, the first thing they noticed was the coachwork tag, barely legible some 70 years after it was attached: Karosseriebau Autenrieth, Darmstadt. The early shell-type racing seat and stripped interior suggested the car had been raced. They noticed what they assumed was a small-displacement BMW straight-six and BMW-stamped bits on the sparse tubular frame.

Rodney dug into his archaeology thing. EBay delivered a car magazine published in 1981 with a story about Veritas, quoting an expert named Jim Proffit. Proffit happens to be an eccentric longtime resident of Long Beach, California (“A Pilgrim’s Progress,” AW, May 21, 1990), known as America’s foremost authority on prewar BMWs. Rodney started cold-calling businesses around Proffit’s former shop in Long Beach and finally found a guy who knew a guy who might have an old email address.

Rodney fired off a note with a picture of the Veritas; days later, he got a reply from Proffit: “Sorry, Heath. That is not much of an introduction. You should tell me who you know that I know to get much out of me.” Rodney persisted, and eventually Proffit’s curiosity overwhelmed his hermitic tendencies. It was clear to him that underneath the Veritas body, there might be a 328.

The two began regular correspondence, and Proffit told Rodney things to look for—the fuel filler, a giant 100-liter fuel tank and where to find a frame number. Back in Villisca, after some buffing and oiling, they found the number: 85031.

Next, Rodney contacted BMW Classic in Munich and initially got the same arm’s-length response, no doubt because Classic has heard it all a thousand times before. He was told that 328 No. 85031 was likely accounted for. Again, the farm boys persisted, and with more photos and maybe a nudge from Proffit, Munich took a more serious look. In May, BMW verified the Veritas as a 328 and issued a certificate of authenticity.

No. 85031 was built in May 1937. Factory records indicate that it was painted white and delivered to BMW in Munich. That could mean only one thing: a factory lightweight.

No. 85031 in its pre-World War II factory lightweight configuration.

The Car. No. 85031’s first stop would have been BMW engineer Rudolf Schleicher’s Experimental Division, which shortly thereafter, at the urging of the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), became BMW’s racing department under the direction of Ernst Loof (who, in turn, founded Veritas after the war).

The 1937-40 BMW 328 debuted as a race car at the Nürburgring on June 14, 1936, 10 months before the first road cars were delivered. It won. It proved to be one of Nazi Germany’s most effective propaganda tools in the late 1930s, and it won more than 200 2.0-liter-class races into the ’50s. For decades after, the 328 set the tone for what a sports car and a production-based race car are supposed to be.

Its inline six-cylinder engine featured overhead valves with short, transverse pushrods and three single-barrel Solex carbs. In the road cars, the six made 80 hp at 4,500 rpm—good, but not spectacular, compared to some of the heavier supercharged engines of the day. It was enough to push the 1,719-pound roadster to a top speed of 97 mph. Third and fourth gears were synchronized. The front suspension was essentially independent, with a single transverse leaf spring. The live axle in back hung from longitudinal leaf springs. The 328 was known to be robust and relatively easy to repair, but its legacy surpasses the sum of its parts. Exactly 464 were built before the war halted production in 1940. Roughly 200 are known to survive, with some 60 percent still in Germany.

The 328 wearing the bodywork it has today.

Veritas? Veritas-Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Sport und Rennwagenbau was launched in March 1947, near Hockenheim, by Loof, former BMW motorcycle racing champ Georg Meier and Lorenz Dietrich, who had supervised the service of BMW aircraft engines during the war. Its objective was building a postwar sports/race car to fill the void left by the 328, which BMW had no immediate intention of doing.

Veritas, too, managed considerable racing success, including German 2.0-liter championships and 17 privately entered FIA world championship appearances into the early ’50s. Yet it was perennially undercapitalized and managed to build only a relative handful of road cars.

Given the company’s management, it’s no big surprise that at least three of the surviving 328 factory lightweights have been found under Veritas-built cars. Indeed, the entire first run of Veritas product was built around 328 chassis and drivetrains, usually with coachwork bodies. That wasn’t some underhanded trick. Most of Germany was proscribed by the Allies from manufacturing new automobiles in the immediate postwar years. You either built in Austria, as Porsche did, or you started with existing stock. For three years, the cars were sold as BMW Veritas, as described on the Iowa coupe’s title, but BMW put the kibosh on that practice in 1949.

Eventually, Veritas built cars on a chassis of its own design with a 2.0-liter six sourced from Heinkel, under model names like Comet, Scorpion and Saturn, yet it lacked the resources to get serious traction. After several reorganizations, Loof moved the company to the Nürburgring, but his money had dried up. BMW absorbed Veritas in 1953 after it had built no more than 78 cars.

It’s believed that two Veritas cars were bodied by Autenrieth, which had thrived prewar by building bodies for Adler, Horch, Maybach, Mercedes-Benz, Opel and NSU. More cars are bodied by Spohn. Some are odd, almost bizarre things apparently inspired by Harley Earl’s Le Sabre. Others are classically gorgeous, including a 1949 Scorpion roadster that won third in class at Pebble Beach and subsequently changed hands at Bonham’s 2015 Pebble auction for $907,500.

Of the original BMW 328s, 403 kept the standard roadster body. The other 61 were largely lightweights—roadsters fitted by Experimental/Racing with lighter, aerodynamically adjusted bodies and a few racing coupes. Yet the lightweight process went well below the 328’s skin. Its 1,971cc M328 six was rebuilt for the race cars with a lighter valvetrain and crank, substantially higher compression, bigger carbs and a larger sump. Output increased nearly 70 percent, to 130-136 hp at 6,500 rpm. The lightweights were fitted with a close-ratio gearbox, the 100-liter racing tank, lighter fade-resistant brake drums and composite steel/alloy wheels.

With a chassis number and BMW’s BMW-like archive, Freshour and Rodney had no trouble tracking the Veritas 328’s racing exploits. Its first run came at Le Mans 1937—barely a month after it left the factory for Experimental, entered by the NSKK for Fritz Roth, Uli Richter and Ernst Henne. It completed only eight laps before it was collected in the aftermath of an accident that killed Pat Fairchild of Britain in another 328 and René Kippeurt of France in a Bugatti Type 44.

Three months later, No. 85031 was shipped to England, where it was entered in the Royal Automobile Club TT at Donington Park as a Frazer Nash-BMW by British BMW distributor H.J. Aldington (with its Bavarian government road plates still attached). His Royal Siamese Highness Prince Birabongse Bhanudej Bhanubandh, better known as Prince Bira, drove it to third overall and first in the 2.0-liter class. One can only guess what the NSKK thought of that.

It ran the 1938 Mille Miglia, where Richter and Fritz Werneck finished third in a BMW 2.0-liter-class sweep and 11th overall. It ran again in the 1938 RAC TT, though Bira managed only 22nd. From there, it was likely retired by BMW for a newer 328, and its history gets murky, at least until 1971. For now, at least, that’s one of the things Freshour and Rodney like best about the car.

The first big question is how 85031 became a Veritas. It likely spent the war somewhere within BMW’s purview. After the war, the company was known to have paid key employees back wages by giving them a car. It’s entirely possible that Loof, et al., stashed a 328 here and there during the war, in anticipation of their plans for after—but Proffit says it’s not likely the Villisca Veritas was built with Veritas money. It was more likely built on the customer’s order, with at least part of the cash on the table, and the customer had to be a fairly high roller. In the late 1940s, a coach-bodied Veritas coupe was an investment on par with a new Ferrari in 2017.

Freshour and Rodney have located a photo of what is 99.9 percent certain to be their car in Germany, and its road plate confirms two things: first, that it was registered in American-occupied Bavaria and, second, that it was there until at least 1950 and as late as 1953.

Putting a car back together is tough enough when it has only lived one life; this BMW has lived two, and each one has historical significance. Dan Brouillette

Then there’s the mystery of how it got to the States and when. The Villisca duo has learned nothing about Robert Good of Council Bluffs—the owner before the farmer. What’s known is that some prewar European cars, including 328s, were shipped to the United States (sometimes through Canada) by sellers on the black market who were in search of a buck. Most were brought back by GIs, and that’s the best guess here.

Perhaps Robert Good was a flyer at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, just across the Missouri from Council Bluffs. Perhaps he was a staff officer at SAC headquarters there. Perhaps Good bought it from such an airman.

Freshour and Rodney know their Veritas 328 hasn’t run since 1966 because that’s the year that it was titled for storage, and they’ve recently discovered additional information that’s almost too crazy to be coincidental. Another Veritas coupe, maybe the other Autenrieth body, lived a long time in Lincoln, Neb.—roughly equal distance from Council Bluffs as Villisca in another direction. One owner has told Rodney that he bought it from a GI who brought it home in 1953. At some point, it was retrofitted with a Chevy small-block, and it raced in SCCA events.

The probability that both Autenrieth Veritas coupes settled in fairly close geographic proximity, in space with considerable GI migration, does suggest a possible connection. No one knows for sure, but Freshour and Rodney aim to find out. They agreed to sit for this story in hope that someone reading might know more.

What now. Freshour and Rodney are joint owners of the Veritas 328 and say they’ve come up with funds for a restoration, depending on what they do. The questions since at least last May have revolved around what they should do.

Their instincts and maybe their egos might tell them to try to restore it themselves. They’ve done a frame-up on a ’71 Dodge Challenger convertible, but the Veritas 328 is uncharted territory, and these guys are savvy. They understand digging all the way in would be arrogant at best—and maybe even self-defeating.

BMW Classic has offered to buy the car as is or, conversely, to restore it as the owners choose. That would have advantages, but BMW wouldn’t actually do much of the work, and the duo from Villisca isn’t keen on paying Munich a hefty surcharge to be general contractor. They’ve also looked at Pebble-grade restorers in the States. That might be the safest route, but also the most expensive (yeah, it’s all expensive), and it would likely take the longest. But there was a more fundamental question to answer, and it came down to how they prioritize their funds. Some of their contacts at Classic have urged them to restore the car as a Veritas on its original lightweight 328 guts—a possibility that has weighed on Freshour, in particular.

“There’s some financial strain here, but we have to do this right,” he says. “To some extent that depends on which piece of history you want to highlight. Even if we settle on the prewar side, we have to honor the Veritas side. We can’t cannibalize or even neglect it as we go forward.”

In early November, fresh from an enlightening week in Germany, Freshour and Rodney were ready to make some decisions. They’d listened to BMW historians at Classic and visited providers of various restoration services. More importantly, they’d slid their hands over restored 328s—and they’d finally met Proffit and got an extended opportunity to pick his brain.

Paperwork from BMW Classic confirms that the barn-find Veritas is chassis No. 85031. Dan Brouillette

“We’re doing the 328 first and worrying about the Veritas later,” Rodney says. “We’re going to build a race car, era correct. Nothing more, nothing less. Can you win Pebble Beach without the original body? Some Ferraris seem to, but we don’t really care.”

Freshour has disassembled the Veritas 328. The rolling frame will be on its way to a specialist in the States, the engine to Europe for a rebuild. After consulting with Proffit, they’ll get a lightweight body from the preferred Karosseriebau in Europe. When it’s all back in Iowa, they may or may not reassemble it themselves. The completion target is two years from now.

Worrying about the Veritas later means stashing the Autenrieth body for the time being, but they’ve already started looking for a derelict ’30s 303-329 series BMW to use as a foundation. They’re out there, believe it or not, and not that far from Villisca.

“The race history is the most important,” says Rodney. “That’s why we have to start by turning the 328 back, even though we know a lot of people are going to argue. We’re going to have some fun. We’re going to learn a lot and see it through, and if someday someone doesn’t like what we do with it, there’s nothing a hundred grand can’t fix.

“I just never thought I’d have to start paying attention to the value of the euro.”

The story. Over the last five years, standard BMW 328 roadsters have averaged about $1 million at auction—some less, others substantially more. Factory lightweights with the right racing pedigree have topped $4 million. Veritas cars in varying condition have ranged from $200,000 to nearly a buck. No one likes talking money in situations like these, but the point is obvious: There’s some low-risk upside for the guys in Villisca. They’d have to mess it up badly to lose their socks, and they won’t.

It seems equally clear that, for Freshour and Rodney, the Veritas 328 isn’t about money (which is not to suggest they’re in a position to ignore it). They do fine doing what they do, but if there’s one thing to demonstrate that it isn’t about money first, it’s Proffit’s embrace.

Proffit once had a successful career restoring Porsches, Ferraris and vintage race cars, but he walked away because he decided the “whole racket had become commoditized.” He settled on prewar BMWs, and he’s owned at least a few 328s over the years. He can tell the difference between a rod or rocker arm from a lightweight or a standard just by holding it in his hand, but the sense is he’s grown a bit disenchanted that 328s have become commoditized, too. His services remain in high demand on two continents, but he rarely chooses to provide them.

“Porsche people seem a much more open group than 328 people,” Rodney observes. “The 328 people seem to like it that way. They’ll drop bad information or misdirect, but Proffit has been like a light. For a guy who’s not supposed to be a people person, he’s put up with us bugging him, takes three calls a week. He’s been generous with his time, and he hasn’t asked for a dime.”

For Proffit, it comes down to the people who asked. “Maybe it’s the way Heath found me, his persistence,” Proffit says. “Maybe it’s sort of like peeing your pants. You’re not inclined to do it, but if you do, it feels pretty good. I think what matters to them are the things that matter.

“They want to restore the car, I’ll help as I can. They want to find the right people to build a body, I’ll try to get them there—because they’re likely to get the same reaction they got from the factory at the start. Everyone has gotten a little callous.”

Addictions intersecting. A real-life Yoda or Mr. Miyagi sharing his craft and a vast knowledge of what he loves in life with a couple of younger men—men who weren’t born when BMW started asserting itself in the new world with the 2002, much less the 328.

If there’s a point to this story, it can probably be synthesized in one sentence, and one regular readers will surmise: From Bavaria to California to the cornfields of Iowa, cars and the bonds they create know no social or cultural barriers.

This article first appeared in the January 22nd 2018 issue of Autoweek magazine. Subscribe today.

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