Lacking definition

Apparently I was right to query how the Auto Union coming up for auction was known to be Nuvolari’s car!

I have never attended an auction but I have two memories. The first was when Michael Sedgwick used to do the catalogues for a noted auctioneer. He had to go abroad on one occasion and asked whether I could take over. “The pay is good,” he said. I was sent the descriptions of the cars for sale as submitted by their owners. A vintage light car was described as generally in good order except for the back axle which would require attention. I rewrote that as: ‘there may need to be some attention to it.’ Even this was deleted from the subsequent catalogue.

Then many years after I had disposed of my 1926 Delaunay-Belleville, it came up for auction, when I had long lost touch with it. The description said it was WB’s car, “which he says is in very fine condition”, a definition I had made when I first owned it a long time before.