The Fords want their punch bowl back.

No, not Betty Ford’s family; they’re most likely off the punch for good. This would be the other Fords, the ones who make the cars. It seems that Dearborn’s first family unwittingly auctioned off the punch bowl that Henry won as a trophy in 1901 when he drove his hand-built race car Sweepstakes to victory at the Detroit Driving Club race in Grosse Point, Michigan.

As the story goes, Alexander Winton was so heavily favored to win the race that he was allowed to pick out the grand prize. But when Winton’s car suffered some mechanical issues on lap 7 of the 10-lap feature, Ford famously drove around Winton, thus handing him his chimney pot hat and taking home the punch bowl. After Henry’s wife, Clara, died in 1950, the bowl was auctioned off with many of the Fords’ possessions, and there are no records to document who purchased it.

You can read the story on Ford’s www.racinginamerica.com, along with the text of a recent speech that Edsel B. Ford II delivered about the race and the punch bowl. Or, in the event that you actually know the whereabouts of the bowl, contact the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford.

(Yes, for those of you who catch the Four-Links posts here every Saturday, we did make mention of the punchbowl search recently. For such a priceless piece of automotive history, we thought it worth repeating. -ed.)