Buy What You Love, Pay What You Should
Columns
-
“Keefie, Come Wake Up the Camel”
My love affair with Citroëns started 50 years ago in San Francisco. I was 20 years old and in between studying intellectual history at Reed College in Portland and dance at The Juilliard School in New York City. I had decided to spend a few months with my grandmother, Dorel, at the family home in…
-
GT Oh No
Bonhams sold Ferrari 250 GTO #3851GT at its 2014 Quail Lodge auction for $38,115,000, including buyer’s premium. It was a world-record sale — the highest price ever obtained at an auction. One would expect Bonhams’ staff and the seller to be high-fiving after the hammer fell. Instead, the seller sued Bonhams. These are some of…
-
Set the WABAC
If you’re of the age when new 1960s sports cars were on your bedroom posters, you surely remember Mr. Peabody. A Saturday morning cartoon favorite, this polymath dog and his pet boy, Sherman, used a time-traveling machine called the WABAC to go on entertaining and educational adventures. Because I’m a Baby Boomer, it’s this “technology”…
-
Rotary Power for the People
The oil crisis of the 1970s frowned heavily on Mazda’s gas-guzzling rotary engines. Under constant development since licensure from NSU in 1961, the enormously expensive rotary-engine program had placed Mazda on the brink of financial ruin. The future looked bleak when Mazda’s largest creditor, Sumitomo Bank, inserted its own corporate leadership in 1977. Then, a…
-
1967 Lotus 51A Formula Ford
The archetypal Formula Ford, the Lotus 51 is also one of the most aesthetically successful models. Listed in the Historic Lotus Register, chassis 51FF123 was delivered new in 1967 to the famous Jim Russell Racing Driver School in England that played a role in the development of drivers such as Derek Bell and Jacques Villeneuve.…
-
2002 Lamborghini Murciélago
As the Lamborghini story goes, the “Murciélago,” or “bat” in Spanish, was named after a famous bull that survived its matador in 1879 in the Cordoba arena. When it was launched in 2002, this was one of the fastest supercars of its day, capable of over 330 km/h thanks to a 580-horsepower, 6.2-liter V12 engine.…
-
1956 Porsche 356A 1600 Cabriolet by Reutter
The term “barn find” has been vastly abused in the collector-car market, but here is a 356A cabriolet which was literally pulled out of an old building near Salem, OH. This matching-numbers cabriolet shows fewer than 46,000 miles — believed to be original — and was delivered in the rarely-seen Aquamarine Blue Metallic with a…
-
1990 Ferrari 348 tb
As can be seen in the service book, this 348 tb was registered on August 3, 1990, in Turin, Italy. Its first owner resided in Ventimiglia, near the French border. When the car was registered in France in 2000 by the owner’s daughter, it had covered fewer than 35,000 km. It has since been used…
-
1938 Bugatti Type 57C Atalante Coupe
When the Bugatti Type 57 first hit the pavement back in 1934, there was simply nothing that could compare to it. Designed by founder Ettore Bugatti’s son, Jean, the Type 57 captured the swanky allure of Art Deco styling with vast curving lines that concluded in sharp, striking angles. Like its predecessors, the Type 57…
-
1970 Aston Martin DB6 Mk II
With the DB6 Mk II’s introduction in June 1969, the final incarnation of the original DB Series, begun in 1958 by the DB4, had arrived. The option of AE Brico fuel injection was the most significant mechanical development, while flared wheelarches, necessitated by the adoption of the wider DBS wheels, were the most obvious. In…