The Meyers Manx that Steve McQueen drove in The Thomas Crown Affair will be offered at the Bonhams Amelia Island 2020 auction. The very car McQueen took Faye Dunaway on a beach ride in the 1968 movie will headline Bonhams’ 6th annual Amelia Island Concours Week event.
The Meyers Manx, developed by Southern California native Bruce Meyers, was the embodiment of the California lifestyle, all in a compact, open-air, go-anywhere funmobile. McQueen’s love for cars and bikes was already well established and it was his influence that brought this distinctly American vehicle into the film directed by Norman Jewison.
Unlike any other Manx, however, McQueen enlisted the help of Pete Condos of Con-Ferr fame to build a completely customized vehicle. In a period documentary about the movie, McQueen said, “Crown lives at the beach and he has a dune buggy. I helped them design it, so I’m kinda proud of that. It’s set on a Volkswagen chassis with big ol’ wide weenies — big wide tires on mag wheels, Corvair engine stuffed in the back … It’s very light, you know (because of the fiberglass body). It’s pulling about 230 horses and weighs about a thousand pounds.”
For more information, visit Bonhams.com.
[Source: Bonhams; photos: MGM Studios; Pawel Litwinski]
