Shifting Gears

Bonneville, Bugattis and Gruel

As you read this, I will be hurtling across the Bonneville Salt Flats in a highly modified 1991 Alfa Romeo Spider, in an attempt to set a few class Land Speed Records. Mike Besic and Craig Beilat will share the driving as we take turns flinging ourselves at a variety […]

Car Collecting in the 21st Century

Isn’t it time to give the Monterey weekend an official name? Let’s get the folks from Pebble Beach, Concorso Italiano, the auctions and Laguna Seca together and keep them sequestered until the white smoke from the chimney indicates they’ve chosen something that encompasses the myriad activities that go on. It […]

An L.A. Weekend

It has long seemed strange that Los Angeles, the first metropolis in the U.S. shaped by the motorcar, and the birthplace of nearly every automotive trend from hot rods to low riders, should have a paucity of high-end automotive activities. Auction companies have tried and failed to establish a regular […]

A Focus Group 300SL?

We’ve spent the last five days behind the wheel of an Oldsmobile mini-van, chasing vintage cars. As the host of a television show Martin Swig is producing about the California Mille for Speedvision, my task was to cheerily interview participants first thing in the morning, then criss-cross the route looking […]

No Longer The King

It’s painful to watch once high-performing veteran athletes in the last years of their careers, as they try desperately to hold on to their departing glory. We see less of their past brilliance than of their current diminished capabilities. I thought about this while piloting my ’64 Ferrari 330 America […]

The Never-Ending Auction

If I were running an auction company, I’d be paying more than a little attention to the proliferation of cars being sold through the Internet. While much of the hype about the Internet is admittedly overblown, nonetheless there are trends emerging that bear watching.Amongst the proliferating on-line auction sites, the […]

Bring on the Mosquitoes

Would you have bought it anyway?That’s what we seem to be asked most frequently about our 1964 Ferrari 330 America, pulled from a barn in Butte, Montana last October.As the bills pile up, and the car remains stationary, that’s a fair question.Since taking delivery of S/N 330GT5077, we’ve had Nasko […]

They Shoot Pintos, Don’t They?

Although Peter Egan at Road & Track probably doesn’t pen his monthly column just to goad us into philosophical musings about the hobby we share, nonetheless he’s done it again. In a recent column, he writes of stumbling across a derelict TR4 in a barnyard, and making the obligatory $50 […]

When Old Cars Were New

“It was a grand time to be writing about cars,” said Car and Driver’s Brock Yates at the recent International Automotive Media Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was referring to the ’60s and early ’70s, when the horsepower race between American manufacturers was in full swing, Ford was locked […]

A Red Egg for Christmas

Our day started innocently enough. Seven-year-old daughter Alexandra and I headed to a local swap meet in search of a pre-’55 American car to use in Martin Swig’s La Carrera Nevada event. While wading through the rusting junk, a.k.a. valuable restorable collector cars, she pulled suddenly at my sleeve.“Look Daddy, […]