Shifting Gears

By now the Scottsdale numbers are familiar: $160m in total sales, very close to the record $167m set in 2007. 2,221 cars sold. Attendance up at every event, and strong individual prices across the board. But the biggest news to come from Scottsdale could be found in a press release issued on February 14, 2011—23…

Saved searches and RSS feeds are now the Pandora’s Box of my collecting life. Years ago, I would get giddy and feel the onset of the red mist once a month when Hemmings arrived (by first-class mail, of course). And when I went to an auction or swap meet, I would be temporarily overcome by…

My first car was a 1959 Bug Eye Sprite that I bought in 1966, on the day I turned 16 and got my license. The Bug Eye was just seven years old at the time. Today, we think nothing of buying a seven-year-old car—doesn’t 2004 sound like new? But back then, a seven-year-old sports car…

I felt like I had entered a tinkerer’s medieval blacksmith shop. Vintage Gran Prix Bugattis from the 1920s and ’30s were strewn haphazardly about the courtyard of the tony Chaminade Resort and Spa in Santa Cruz, CA, and seemingly half of them were being taken apart and put back together. The tap, tap, tap of…

When I was growing up in San Francisco, my grandparents and I watched the ’49ers play in Kezar Stadium. Or, more correctly, we drove to our weekend farm in nearby Novato, which was just outside the 30-mile blackout range of the broadcasts, to watch the games on television. I remember the sometimes-heated discussions that occurred…

In our August, 2010 issue, I went out on an automotive limb and predicted that the aggregate total of the sales from the 2010 Monterey weekend would rebound from last year’s paltry $120m and reach the lofty, record-breaking plateau of $140m. The reaction on the web was immediate, with various chat rooms and blogs using…

  Mix American artist Jeff Koons, the 35th anniversary of the BMW Art Car Collection, a 3-series prepped for the GT2 Class at Le Mans and a gala reception at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the result is a striking race car that reaffirms BMW’s commitment to high performance, and to high art. In…

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…