Keith Martin

Here are two extremes of collector car acquisition. The first is the barn find, where, wearing your “Tom Cotter Taught Me How to Buy Cars” T-shirt, you slog through the backwoods of the (usually southern) countryside, until you see the back of a Ferrari 250 Monza or Split-Window Fuelie inside a falling-down garage. You find…

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11. A direct consequence of that was the collapse of the collector car market. For instance, Daytonas, the poster children of the Ferrari market, fell almost overnight from their August 2008 heights in Monterey of $350k, to a more earthly $225k. Alfa TZ-1s stopped changing hands…

“Not all who wander are lost.” That’s a fitting description of the day I spent trolling for treasure at the Portland Swap Meet. The largest event of this type on the West Coast, it has over 4,200 vendor booths and attracts more than 50,000 gearheads. But that’s not the end of it. Right next door,…

I’ve just returned from a sensory overload collector car experience in the Sunshine State. Somewhere between RM’s BMW 600 “limousine,” Gooding’s Alfa 2000 spider, Sam and Emily Mann’s Mercedes 540K Special roadster, and the Collier ex-Martini Porsche 917, ten days of March have disappeared in a collector car blur. Between auctions, seminars, meetings, and television…

Two years ago, the art market had cratered, with both Sotheby’s and Christie’s suffering huge year-over-year declines in their annual New York sales. But on February 3, the market spoke with an authoritative voice, as “Walking Man I,” a life-size bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, was sold by Sotheby’s for $104.3m, a world record for…

At every car club meeting, gray-haired elders debate the future of car collecting. They wonder if the current generation will wean itself from texting and playing World of Warcraft long enough to learn to use a Uni-Syn to balance their SU carburetors, or feeler gauges to measure valve clearances. They also wonder where are the…

With this February issue, we are now well into the 22nd year of Sports Car Market. Twenty-two is my lucky number. My birthday falls on the 22nd, and my race cars have always been numbered 22. When we first started SCM in our basement, as the four-page mimeographed Alfa Romeo Market Letter, we never imagined…