Shifting Gears

If you’re reading SCM, chances are you’re an enthusiast. Your friends may uncork a vintage Barolo and marvel over the bouquet; you’d just as soon go out to the garage and inhale the gasoline and oil vapors that constantly seep out of a vintage car. This has been an exceptionally busy year for me and…

Buckle your seatbelts and tighten your shoulder harnesses. Based on the results from Monterey, the collector car market is in the midst of a wild and woolly ride, with little way of predicting the crests and valleys in the year ahead. There are a few things we can all agree on as we plow through…

The market continues to surge toward all-time highs and surpass the prices made 18 years ago as more and more people look to buy used cars at all levels. For those looking to buy, questions about authenticity and provenance continue to be one of their keys to valuation. As we noted in our review of…

It’s been nearly 25 years since we’ve seen prices like this in the sports and exotic market. As nearly everyone knows by now, RM came within just $500,000 of setting the record for the most expensive car ever to sell at auction at their Maranello sale, where the 330 TRI/LM, s/n 0808, brought $9,281,250. It…

Fifty years from now the Petersen Museum may feature a diorama dedicated to the social gathering once known as an “automotive swap meet.” Young children will tug on their daddy’s shirtsleeves and ask, “Thousands of people just showed up and walked around for hours, hoping they might find something?” And Daddy will answer, “Yes, and…

“Push? We’re going to push the car?” It was a balmy day in the Pacific Northwest, so I had decided to take out our orange and black 1979 Triumph Spitfire. My 15-year-old daughter, Alex, was pleased with my choice, as the previous owner had put large speakers behind the seats, making it a perfect car…

We at SCM have long maintained that a well-filled garage is like a well-stocked wine cellar. Just as different times of day, different events, and different meals call for different pourings, so, too, do different motoring adventures require different motoring choices. And just as each wine has its own trademark taste, bouquet, and color, each…

Perhaps SCM should be in the soft adventure business. But rather than offering a chance to parachute off mountaintops attached to a safety-line, or fly a Russian Mig with an instructor who will keep you from nosing into the ground, we have something even better. Last year, my former editor at Automobile Magazine, Joe Lorio,…

“How did you get started with cars?” is a question I’m often asked.While I have been fortunate to have a variety of careers and occupational passions, cars and machinery came first.My earliest memories of the mysteries of the internal combustion engine revolve around my grandfather, Thomas Lester McDowell, who, along with my grandmother, Dorel Evelyn,…

Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and other times it leads to nothing but trouble. Our 1978 911SC is a perfect case in point. Relatively pampered, in mostly original paint, and with 177,000 miles on it when it joined our stable last year, it rode low and had an appealing “boy racer” look. It also had a…