Keith Martin

Upgrade Your Classic With a 5-Speed?

Should you upgrade the transmission on your vintage car? That’s one of the debates in today’s collector car world. The discussions revolve around “as built” correctness versus upgrades for driveability. Most of the small-displacement, under-2,000-cc vintage cars from the ’50s and ’60s handle, stop and start reasonably well. You simply […]

The Alfa, Viper, Volvo, Méhari and Me

A Gearhead’s Trip Through A Vintage-Car Theme Park You can tell the weather is getting better because I’m spending more time in the SCM/ACC garage. It all started last week when seven-year-old Bradley asked if I would take him to school in the Viper. I asked why that car, and […]

Old Cars: More Reliable Now Than Ever

I was giving a talk at the local MG club meeting last Friday evening. We were discussing road trips, and the SCM “Road to Reno” adventure came up. In 2011, we bought three 1972-73 MGBs (two convertibles and a GT), refurbished them and drove to Reno for the All-MG Register […]

400 Miles in a Porsche Turbo

  Our 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo arrived a week ago, and as soon as I was able to wrestle it away from my 23-year-old daughter Alex, I started scouting out reasons to take a road trip. An email announcing “Deadly by Nature: Venom and Poison” caught my eye. It was […]

Should Your Child Drive Your Collector Car?

Kids crash cars. They crash new cars and old cars. They will crash anything they drive. But how do we expect young kids to grow up with a love for our cranky old cars if we make them wait until they are 25 years old to drive them? By then, […]

The Arizona Whirlwind

Arizona in January is one of my busiest weeks of the year. The What’s My Car Worth? production crew shoots multiple episodes. I emcee the Arizona Concours d’Elegance. We put on Insider’s Seminars at Gooding & Company and Barrett-Jackson. We host a consignment tour at RM. And we run a week-long subscriptions […]

Scottsdale – Tales of a 540K, Corvette L88s and Frank Lloyd Wright

I’m sitting in Bruce Covill’s 1972 Ferrari 365 GTC/4. It’s my mobile office as I write this blog while on the Arizona Concours d’Elegance Tour. (Covill’s company Cyberitas Technologies, developed the mobile app for the concours, available here.) We’ve just finished a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. This […]

Two Collector Car New Year’s Resolutions

2014 is winding down, and it’s been quite a 12 months for SCM and me. On the magazine side, our page count is up significantly over 2013. We have more subscribers, more advertisers and higher newsstand sales. We’re distributing in bookstores in England, Australia and other countries for the first […]

What My Cars Want for Christmas

I thought I had my key Christmas gifts all wrapped up. Seven-year-old Bradley is getting a Sphero 2.0 that he can race around the house. Alex will get a visit to trendy clothier Mario’s, with carte blanche in her selection, as long as it costs less than the overdrive rebuild […]