(Used Car Culture vs. the International Art Market)
If any of you were disappointed to hear that this year's receipts at the much-anticipated Monterey classic car auctions were below those from 2014, you may be reassured to learn that this result was largely because the weekend's top earner, a $17+ million dollar Ferrari 250LM, was around $20 million cheaper than last year's trophy Ferrari. As with last year, the preponderance of the take went to the top 10% of the cars on offer (a bit like the distribution of wealth in modern America). Surveying the results at the High Art auction houses like RM Sotheby's, Gooding and Bonhams might convey the impression that all the great cars have been vacuumed up by hedge fund managers and Silicon Valley software moguls (many of them have) but there were some bargains to be had this year at Monterey, and at least one timeless classic went for the new-car equivalent of entry-level Lexus money. Shifting our attention away from the purveyors of taste and tone is a bit like switching from The Fashion Channel to The Fishing Channel, but moving over to Mecum, for example, or Russo and Steele, will tell us what car enthusiasts without Swiss bank accounts might be able to find.
First of all, the bad news. If you've finally awakened to the fact that pre-DeTomaso Maseratis and pre-Fiat Lancias were nicely engineered, tastefully styled underdogs in the world of arty used cars, your train has already left the station. The Maserati Ghibli, which summed up the late 60s Jet Set esthetic as well as anything on wheels, is now priced at five to ten times what it brought five years ago, if the coupe which sold for over $300k is an indication. And a Lancia Aurelia Spider, which Pinin Farina seems to have designed for the Jet Set before there was one, went for over $1,900,000. These prices reflect the expansion of the classic car market beyond the old LA to London circuit to include newly-minted zillionaires in Mumbai and Shanghai. Will the bubble burst now that the Chinese economy has slowed and the stock market has deflated a bit? There are signs that we are in a bubble, but it may take more than a decline in the stock market to burst it. After the crash of 1987, values of antiques, art, and old cars actually went up. Now, on to the good news, as embodied by a few Honest Used Cars…
Once you come down the spiral staircase from the penthouse suite occupied by the seven-figure vintage racers and eight-figure Figoni-bodied one-offs, the big story in the classic car boom is the ascendency of production cars (vehicles made in the thousands) to the price levels formerly occupied by genuinely rare cars. For example, a nice (but not perfectly original) '57 Chevy Nomad (a jazzy 2 door wagon that first gave us Sport without any of that dreary Utility) went for over $50k, and an Austin Healey 100-6 (in lovely condition, but not the racier 100-4 or the posh 3000) brought nearly that. Bathtub Porsche 356 cabriolets have ascended to $200k and beyond (remember, they made around 70,000 bathtub Porsches, most with VW-derived pushrod engines) and Series One E-type Jaguar roadsters now bring $200k to nearly $400k depending how perfect they are (and despite their undeniable beauty, "perfection" is not often a word immediately summoned by "Jaguar.") By the way, if you look at the overall production of E-types, you find they nearly match the figure for bathtub Porsches. So, as with the Porsche 356, we have a mechanical and industrial design artifact which is charming, but not all that rare. (Full disclosure; I've owned the same '67 E-type coupe for 42 years, and it's been a good car, but I'd never consider displaying it in my living room. Too many oil leaks, for one thing).
Scrolling through the sales, however, I found four cars which tell us something about the transitory border between cars as art and cars as used commodities. We begin with a '67 E-type Jaguar two passenger coupe, tastefully restored in dark blue with gray interior. E-type coupes have always trailed the open roadsters in price, but have caught up a bit in the current boom. This car, a rare "Series 1-1/4" (still with 3 SU carbs, knock-off hubs and toggle switchgear as on the Series 1, but no glass covers over the headlights) failed to make Mecum's $100k to $125k estimate and sold for $80,000. This may be because people always expect the covered lights on a '67, or the more usual BRG over black color scheme (I think blue over gray is perfect). If the driving experience matches the appearance and the boom market continues, this car may look like a bargain by next summer.
Next to catch my eye at Mecum was a 1964 Imperial convertible, Elwood Engel's clever restyling of Virgil Exner's 1957 Imperial. Starting with the old windshield / cowl assembly and ample frame, Engel transformed Exner's finned wonder into a riff on his own brilliant design for the 1961-63 Lincoln Continental convertible, but without that car's 4 doors or fiendishly complex top mechanism. The Imperial already had curved side glass in '57, so this feature also matches the Lincoln, as do the blade-like fender planes outlined in chrome. Unlike his Lincoln design, Engel slanted the fenders upward and outward from stern to prow, perhaps a nod to Exner's Forward Look. The wide whitewalls are an anachronism (they were largely gone by '62) but give the car presence, and the condition doesn't disappoint. For $42k someone got a truly rare car. Chrysler built just 922 Imperial ragtops in 1964 (just over 1/4 of that year's Lincoln tally), and from '57 through '66 (my favorite years) convertible production only got beyond three digits once, in the boom year of 1957. Like the letter-series Chrysler 300 convertible which can sell for 3 to 4 times this price, the Imperial has bags of torque and horsepower, and you'll never see yourself coming down the road.
BMWs don't appear in classic auctions nearly as often as Porsches or Jags, so it was a pleasure to see this 1973 BMW 3.0 CS coupe on offer. Rebuilt as a sort of "resto-mod" (all right, a hot rod), the car was uprated with a 5 speed transmission, bigger and punchier inline six, bigger wheels, and tasteful but non-standard blue paint. Despite, or perhaps (given the current "originality" vogue) because of these revisions, the glassy, graceful coupe failed to make Mecum's estimate of $35k to $50k, and went out the door for $32,500. This is below what you'd pay for a new, entry-level BMW, and edging towards used car territory. If this machine runs as happily as it looks, it's a bargain, especially as all the hard-to-find interior and exterior trim pieces seem to be there. Full disclosure again: I happen to own one of these, and know how hard some of the pieces are to find. If the new owner wants to go "original" he or she can find the original style wheels with matching tires, and just keep quiet about the extra hundred horses under the hood.
Possibly saving the best for last, we stop to check out a car which has been rated by engineers, designers and car collectors as a classic from the moment it first appeared in 1936. Originally designed by Gordon Buehrig as a sort of baby Duesenberg, the front-drive Cord 810 and supercharged 812 series is one of the most significant cars ever. The Cord was one of the cars exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art in its landmark 1951 show, Eight Automobiles (the curators picked a sedan like this one). Remarkably, the 812 on offer at Mecum's auction stand had the correct Lycoming V8, as well as the electric pre-selector gearbox featured on the original. The car looked spotless and correct inside and out, with none of the "improvements" some owners were tempted to add. And while the closed models usually sell for less than the convertibles, the sedan's smoothly curved roof encloses a private, cozy cabin with its own unique character…all fronted by possibly the most memorable instrument panel design of any car. This piece, ready for the gallery or a road tour, rolled out the door on period-correct wheels and tires for $42k, quite a bit less than some of the vintage Toyota Land Cruisers offered at this year's auctions. High art at a used-car price, and my pick for the best deal of the entire auction series.
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