Shifting Gears

“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…

In the collector car world, January is Arizona time. Last year, in an economic atmosphere that seemed considerably more bleak, 1,726 cars went to new owners, and $133m changed hands. This year, I predict we’ll see a slight uptick in sales, perhaps 10%. If the surprising strength of the recent Sotheby’s New York art sale…

For the past three months, I’ve managed to use the SCM 1964 Volvo 544 as my primary family car, and as my daily driver. I’ve put just over 2,000 miles on it. In September, my wife Wendie and I and our two-year-old Bradley piled into it for the 400-mile round-trip journey to Sunriver, Oregon, where…

Every week, we send out the “SCM Insider” email, chock full of breaking news, auction results, select videos, and a reader poll to more than 30,000 rabid collectors like you. Our question in the June 30 newsletter asked readers to choose one of four outcomes for the 2009 Monterey weekend. Forty-four percent of you thought…

Over the next few months, nearly 750,000 clunkers are going to be scrapped. Not dismantled, mind you, but smashed and melted into their base, formative materials. Whether or not this is good government policy we’ll leave to our friends at The Economist. And others can debate the relative environmental effects; for instance, some claim the…

Each year, we call this our “Pebble Beach” issue. We wrap it up about one month before the Monterey week, and through the coordination of our printer and the trucking companies, copies magically appear at nearly every Monterey venue, from the Lodge at Pebble Beach to Concorso Italiano. By its nature, SCM is both reflective…