A 2008 Spyker C8 Laviolette with just 1,600 miles on its odometer is up for auction on Bring a Trailer, closing April 6. That alone would be enough to stop collectors in their tracks. But the real story is who overhauled it — and what he’s doing next.
The car has been freshened by Jasper den Dopper, a Netherlands-based Spyker specialist who last fall was tapped by the company’s original founder to restart the brand entirely. Den Dopper’s work on this particular C8 included new weatherstripping, refreshed ignition components, and replacement dampers. He treated it like a calling card, and now it’s going to the highest bidder while the man who restored it tries to resurrect the company that built it.
The Laviolette was always the oddball’s oddball. Only about 60 were made, distinguished from the earlier Spyder convertibles by a tinted glass canopy roof that gave it the silhouette of a fighter jet’s cockpit. Spyker leaned heavily on its pre-war heritage as an aircraft engine manufacturer, plastering a propeller on the badge and filling the cabin with enough polished aluminum to make a Breitling boutique feel understated.
That interior is the car’s party trick. The exposed gearshift linkage, pivoting around a chromed rod like a piece of kinetic sculpture, made Ferrari’s gated manual look almost conventional. The toggle switches, the machined bezels, the four-spoke steering wheel — every surface screams aviation nostalgia filtered through early-2000s ambition. The steering wheel on this example is a Euro-style replacement, one of the few deviations from stock.
The 4.2-liter naturally aspirated V-8 came from Audi, producing 400 horsepower and mated to a six-speed Getrag manual. It wasn’t the fastest thing on the road even in 2008 — a Porsche 911 Turbo would walk it in a straight line — but speed was never the point. The Spyker existed to prove that a car could be a sensory experience first and a stopwatch exercise never.
That philosophy is exactly what killed the company the first time around. Spyker’s corporate history after the C8 era was a cascading disaster involving a doomed acquisition of Saab from General Motors, bankruptcy proceedings, fraud allegations against founder Victor Muller, and years of legal tangles across multiple countries. The brand became a cautionary tale about what happens when ambition outruns capital by several laps.
Now Muller has retained the naming rights and wants another go. Enlisting den Dopper suggests the reborn Spyker intends to stay small, specialist, and rooted in craftsmanship rather than chasing volume. Whether the market will support that in 2026, when even Lamborghini and Ferrari are electrifying their lineups and performance benchmarks are set by software updates, remains an open question.
This auction car, though, exists in a purer moment. Sixteen hundred miles means someone bought it, admired it, and barely drove it. The refreshed mechanicals from den Dopper suggest it’s now ready to actually be used, which is the best possible fate for a machine this theatrical.
Spyker always occupied a strange niche — too exotic to be practical, too low-volume to build a proper dealer network, too weird to compare directly to anything from Maranello or Stuttgart. The C8 Laviolette was a car for people who wanted their neighbors to ask questions they couldn’t easily answer. In a market increasingly defined by subscription services and over-the-air updates, that kind of stubborn individuality feels less like nostalgia and more like defiance.
The auction closes April 6. The Spyker revival has no confirmed timeline. One of those things will definitely happen.
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