Rusting Alfa Romeo sells for £1m

Enzo Ferrari in an Alfa Romeo 1500 race car in a 1927 photo

LONDON, England -- A rusting but rare sports car that was left to languish in a shed for 42 years has sold at auction for £1.063 million ($1.54 million).

The 1932 2.3 litre supercharged Alfa Romeo 8C-2300 Corto Spider Corsa was sold on Saturday.

London-based auctioneers Bonhams & Brooks said it was one of the first cars to wear the Scuderia Ferrari racing team's now legendary Prancing Horse badge in international competition.

It went under the hammer at the auctioneers' historic festival sale of sports and competition motor cars and motor sport memorabilia at Silverstone race circuit in Northamptonshire.

Expected to fetch between £700,000 and £1.1 million, it was sold as part of the estate of an unnamed former BBC TV outside broadcast cameraman, who died recently and had bought it for £350 in 1959.

The car had sat uninsured in a wooden hut on a smallholding for more than 42 years.

Bonham's spokesman Doug Nye said: "It's been locked away in a little wooden hut uninsured on a smallholding -- it's an amazing find."

Before Enzo Ferrari built his own supercars he was an Alfa Romeo dealer and customers could pay extra to have Ferrari tweak their cars for the racetracks of Europe, Nye said.

The car was bought after intense competition at Saturday's auction by an overseas bidder, whose identity has not been disclosed.

Ferrari was a major Alfa Romeo distributor between the wars when he established his co-operative Scuderia Ferrari racing team to campaign the Milan-built cars in competition.