Shifting Gears

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 on urban freeways last week.…

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 only one that has reached…

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 of Nasko’s Imports put in…

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 offer for it, rationalizing that…

“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 in its titanic battle with…

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, it’s an Easter Egg car.”…

Our circuitous, car-filled week started with a trip to the Autofair at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina, where I was co-host of a Speedvision special, “Muscle Car Mania,” to be broadcast Thanksgiving weekend. The swap meet and car show occupied the entire infield of the Speedway, and presented over 100,000 enthusiasts with the…

Now that the annual Monterey convention of dealers and stealers, gearheads and tire-kickers, lookie-lous and wallet-flashers is over, it’s time to reflect. For several years, the weekend’s events have overlapped, but this year the congestion was ludicrous. The traffic jam to the track on Saturday rivaled the Bronx expressway on a Friday afternoon before the…

We’ve just returned from a grand three days, participating in the 10th Annual Monte Shelton N.W. Classic Rally. Our ’68 Porsche 911L performed splendidly for the 1,000 miles through Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, and never missed a beat until it was three miles from home. We stopped to pick up our daughter at my wife’s…

If you’ve been dabbling in collector cars for a decade or more, you’ve been through the meteoric highs and the dismal, depressing lows. Eight years ago, carbureted Ferrari 308s sold for over $70,000, and Boxers passed $250,000. Porsche Speedsters were bringing $100,000, and flat-floor Jaguar E-type convertibles even more. If you were selling, those were…