Keith Martin

I’m wrestling with the “size” question again. What should a “right-sized” collection look like? And what should the philosophy behind the cars selected be? How many cars is enough? First, with a nod of the head to vintage car events, I would suggest you need two pre-1975 cars, one open and one closed. While some…

The moment is indelibly ingrained in my memory bank. I was on a 140-mile tour around Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. There were 34 of us on the tour, ranging from the SCM 1965 Volvo 122S to a slew of modern big-butt Porsches. We were participating in a Drive Toward a Cure event to…

I continue to tiptoe through the automatically equipped tulips of the collector car world. Due to our ingrained disdain for slushboxes (well-deserved, given the Jurassic technology of the most-often used three-speed Borg Warner 35 tranny), these cars can be bought at a substantial discount from their manual-shift brethren. While my decision to pursue automatics was…

This modern car thing has gotten into my bloodstream. Since July, when our 2004 Mercedes SL 55 AMG arrived, Bradley and I have put nearly 5,000 miles on it – including two trips to Montana. I hate to put this in writing, but so far, the car has behaved perfectly. It had 43,000 miles on…

“Portland has the worst air quality of any city in the world.” That was an Internet headline on Sunday, Sep. 13. Of course, COVID-19 has kept me and Bradley from socializing much since March. Now, the smoke from the wildfires raging on the West Coast forced us to stay indoors. So when a friend in…

Gatherings of British Cars over the Labor Day weekend is a tradition throughout much of the U.S. This year, a “British Invasion Show and Shine” was held at Alderbrook Park in Brush Prairie, Washington. A 30-mile drive, predominantly on back roads, it would be a perfect opportunity to use our  1971 Jaguar E-Type S3 coupe…

I was recently on a Zoom call with the organizers of a concours in the Midwest. As is the case with all concours, we were kicking around ideas concerning how to create more engagement with a younger demographic. Increasing revenue was also discussed. Like many high-end shows, this concours hosts a non-judged, everyone-welcome Cars and…

There is an unexpected silver lining in what the COVID-19 virus has done to the collector car world. As nearly all transactions have moved online, buyers now demand an unprecedented amount of information about cars they are interested in. The days of wandering into an auction, looking over a car, reading the scant details on…