What it's not, definitely: A Porsche. What it's not, mostly: A Volkswagen. What it's not, almost certainly: a courier car designed for the Luftwaffe. Instead, the 1947 Volkhart V2 is so much more: a hand-built aluminum-bodied one-off built on a wartime Volkswagen chassis to test advanced aerodynamic designs, done by a guy who previously drove rocket-powered cars, which was once thought lost to history, and which will now head to public auction for the first time. (Phew.)

The story starts with Kurt Julius Carl Ernst Volkhart (no relation to our own Kurt Ernst), the son of a German painter who, in the early Teens, decided to travel to the U.S. to become a race car driver. Then, after his return to Germany, he added automobile engineer to his resume. By the late Twenties, he ended up at Opel, where he took over the development of RAK1, a two-stage rocket-powered race car that he drove to about 80 miles per hour during a closed-track demonstration. The succeeding RAK2 managed to best that mark by a wide margin, but Volkhart had split with Fritz von Opel by then to build his own rocket car, the Volkhart-R1, which he demonstrated a handful of times before returning to conventional competition cars.

Not long after, he linked up with Reinhard von Koenig-Fachsenfeld, a patent clerk, amateur aerodynamicist, and Paul Jaray disciple whose ideas intrigued Volkhart. Together they worked on four-wheeled prototypes and racing machines for Bad Gotesberg-based motorcycle manufacturer Imperia, including at least two rear-engined or mid-engined streamliners with fully independent suspensions. One, an open-wheeled closed-cockpit racer, was dubbed the VR1. Another, an envelope-bodied closed-cockpit sports car, debuted at the Berlin Motor Show in 1935 with a 750-cc radial three-cylinder two-stroke engine, but never reached production. All the work that Koenig-Fachsenfeld and Volkhart put into the streamliners bankrupted the company, leaving them without an outlet for their ideas, for a few years at least.

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