Extraordinarycarcollections.com

With this site we want to share our experiences and materials with all lovers of classic cars, especially cars from famous brands made before World War 2. We do many research regarding barn finds and we already discovered several. If anyone has some knowledge of a possible barn find, please contact us. We will do serious research.

 With our German friend Kay Hottendorff – also a lover of these kind of cars pur sang - we started investigating the history and the fate of the “Sleeping Beauties”. The car collection of Michel Dovaz, photographed by the German photographer Herbert Hesselmann in the eighties. His photos went all over the world and together with the German text writer Halwart Schrader he published two books (1986 and 2007) about this collection. Both really nice books with magnificent photos, but both books don’t tell the history of the collection and what became of it. The three of us spend during three years many hours to answer the questions, that the books of Hesselmann didn’t and we discovered the truth about the collection, its fate, we traced almost every car of the collection and most of all we got the opportunity to speak to Michel Dovaz. We found out, that the story of both Hesselmann books was not the real truth and that – for example – Michel Dovaz was a nice, intelligent gentleman, who saved several really nice cars from being scrapped. The three of us wrote a book about our experience which was published in Holland November 2008 with the title “het lot van de slapende schoonheden” (publisher “de Alk”, Netherlands) and the book will be published in English (publisher “Veloce”, England) in 2010. We are very grateful to Michel Dovaz, who wrote the foreword of the book and to our co-author Kay Hottendorff, who did an enormous amount of work. It was a pleasure to work with him.

If you already want to sign in for the English book, please contact ard@opdeweegh.eu

At the moment we are investigating some unknown barn finds and we are investigating the Schlumpf affair, the collection and the real history behind it. It looks like the Schlumpfs are due to a rehabilitation, too. We think, this book will be ready in the second part of 2010.

We hope you will enjoy our site with all it's photos and films. There is still much to discover and we are almost daily busy with the stuff. Investigating, writing and delivering lectures. In his daily live son Arnoud is an automotive student at the university of technics and father Ard is a school principal in Holland. Please let us know what you think of the site and enjoy the beautiful stuff, that’s on it.

Arnoud op de Weegh (arnoud@opdeweegh.net)

 Ard op de Weegh (ard@opdeweegh.eu)