Buy What You Love, Pay What You Should
Keith Martin
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Keith’s Blog: Car Knitting, SCM-Style (Part One)
The past three years have been a non-stop series of car adventures, one after the other. Unable to drive a manual-shift car since my stroke, I’ve pivoted and started exploring cars with automatic gearboxes. While my entire life I have looked at these two-pedal cars with disdain, my life has changed and my choice has…
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Keith’s Blog: Monterey: Everyone’s a Winner
Monterey Car Week exuded the vibes of automotive passion back in full swing. Even 700 miles away at SCM World Headquarters in Portland, the energy was apparent. Unofficial auction results totaled more than $460m, besting 2015’s previous high of $394m. SCM had a full team on site, led by Executive Editor Jeff Sabatini. From the…
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Two for 2022
Sixty-six thousand. That’s how many miles cars wearing an SCM 1000 roundel traveled last summer. And we’re just counting the entrants. The tally doesn’t include the dozens of support staff and amazing volunteers involved who kept the events running like a Halda Speedpilot. The SCM 1000 AMG Invitational was held in Bend, OR, in June…
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Keith’s Blog: Why Own it if it Doesn’t Change Your Life?
The Check Engine light came on again on the SCM 2000 Land Rover Discovery II. (You might ask if they ever actually stay out.) When I asked our Rover guru, Doug Shipman of Ship’s Mechanical about it, he suggested I get a code reader. “Once I see what code it’s throwing, we can proceed with…
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Keith’s Blog: The SCM Citroën DS21 is Moving On
We’re shuffling the SCM collection (menagerie?) again. Our 1971 Citroën DS21 Pallas has been an extraordinary car. Since we bought it last August, we have put 1,500 miles on it. Most recently it completed the SCM 1000 without any issues. It was driven by Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance Founder Bill Warner and SCM Contributor Ken…
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Keith’s Blog: Three Takeaways From the SCM 1000
We’ve just completed our fourth SCM 1000, a thousand-mile tour for pre-1975 cars. There will be more about it in upcoming issues of SCM. But with my bags barely unpacked and the SCM cars still being put away, here are the highlights. First, riding with SCM contributor Ken Gross and Amelia Island founder Bill Warner…
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Keith’s Blog: Another Day in Traffic Hell
I played hooky from work last week and took our 1971 Jaguar E-type V12 coupe for a 150-mile drive. Our lunch destination was Skamania Lodge, the home base of the 2022 SCM 1000. It’s about 50 miles away. There are a couple of ways to get there. My co-driver, Lou Tauber, was a friend from…
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Keith’s Blog: My Hook is Always Baited
When we asked Somer Hooker to be the SCM Concours Ambassador, I envisioned his role as finding cars at events that deserved SCM recognition. I didn’t realize he would also start sending me links to cars for sale that he thinks might interest me. For instance, this vintage 1965 BMW 2000 C. While I’m not…
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Keith’s Blog: A Classic Tour for Modern Cars?
I recently completed the 2022 SCM 1000 AMG Invitational. There were 25 performance Mercedes of various vintages entered. The star car was the 2009 SLR McLaren Stirling Moss entered by Wynn McCaw. The event was set up exactly the same as SCM 1000 Classic events we have put on in the same location. It was…
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Keith’s Blog: Bad Driving and the End of Tours – You Respond
Last week my blog stressed the need for all of us on tours to drive responsibly. Thoughtless drivers can not only leave a lasting poor impression of sports cars with the communities they pass through, but they can also end up creating accidents with potentially fatal consequences. Here are a few of the responses I…