Keith Martin

I can’t think of a better way to spend a nice Sunday morning than chatting with good friends about old cars. Noted collector Bruce Meyer is a board member at the Los Angeles-based Petersen Automotive Museum, and he hosted a panel discussion there last weekend. I was the moderator, and with me were Aaron Weiss of…

The 21st annual Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance is all wrapped up. I’ve been here for 19 of the events to date, and each has been memorable. In many ways, the Amelia Island weekend is a spring break camp for gearheads. It’s as if each year our parents bundle us off and send us to a familiar…

Since it first arrived in January of 2015, the SCM 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo has seen almost nonstop action. Alexandra confiscated the car as soon as it was unloaded from the trailer that brought it up from Los Angeles, and I didn’t see it for a month. Then Bradley and I took it on a 400-mile trip to…

This stuff always seems to happen by accident. I had just finished driving the 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo to a lunch meeting in Wilsonville, OR – a suburb 19 miles south of SCM World Headquarters. I hadn’t put many miles on the car recently. My trip log showed the last time I’d filled it with gas…

We’ve talked a lot about ways to get and keep young people involved with classic cars. I believe you have to get them used to old cars while they are children, and one good way to do this is to include them in your old-car activities. Both my children, Alexandra (now 24) and Bradley (8),…

It’s driving time again. My rotator-cuff surgery is healing well, and the surgeon has given me the okay to drive stick-shift cars. So I’ve been driving the Giulia Super for the past couple of weeks and thinking about how much I appreciate vintage cars, the mastery they require and how intuitive they are to service.…

SCM Legal Files author John Draneas and his wife Carlyn hosted a Super Bowl party on Sunday at their home, about 20 miles away in Wilsonville, OR. The weather was glorious, and it was the perfect opportunity to exercise SCM’s 1967 Alfa Romeo Giulia Super. I pulled the Super out of long-term storage and went through my routine. I checked the…

One-hundred eighty-seven miles north of the Arizona Biltmore is Meteor Crater, one mile wide and 570 feet deep. When the meteorite hit the earth, some 50,000 years ago, it impacted with an estimated force equivalent to 2½ million tons of TNT. At 3 p.m. last Sunday, another meteor was observed — but this one’s impact was visual, not physical.…