Review: Charterhouse
“Classic car boom hits the skids” thundered The Times in a marketdepressing article by its transport correspondent. The doom-laden piece linked the Coutts Bank Index charting a fall in the returns for classic cars, with 47 per cent of cars failing to sell at the recent RM Sotheby’s sale in Battersea; RM’s failure rate was around half that of the previous year.
Having charted an increase in collector vehicle values of almost 332 per cent since 2005, the number-crunchers at the Queen’s bank reported a fall in 2015 and are now claiming that cars have suffered the largest fall in value of any investment market, with a price drop of 10.4 per cent in the past year.
Coutts’ doom-laden stance is contradicted, however, by the Historic Automobile Group International’s Top Car Index, which closed almost unchanged in August and has only corrected by 3.25 per cent for 2017 to date with a full year-on-year gain of 1.25 per cent. Both the HAGI P, which monitors classic Porsche transactions, and the HAGI F, which does the same for Ferraris, also showed gains of 0.78 per cent and 9.12 per cent in August trades.
Furthermore, just three days after facing the stark reality of only selling just over half of its auction cars in London, RM Sotheby’s managed to shift all but four of the 42 entries in Italy during its 91 per cent-sold Ferrari 70th Anniversary Sale alongside the Fiorano test track. A total of £56.52m was invested in the futures of 38 Ferraris. Among them, a 2017 LaFerrari that hasn’t even been completed yet raised £7.55m for the Save the Children charity and the 1983 400i owned by The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards made a model world record £313,950. Even more of a vote of confidence in the blue chip health of our favourite commodity was surely the £1.64m paid for a Japanese barn-find 1969 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 – the only alloy-bodied road-going ‘Daytona’ in existence – which duly became the most valuable of its kind ever sold at public auction.
The classic car market is ‘on the skids’, then is it? I don’t think so…
‘RM Sotheby’s shifted all but four of the cars in its Ferrari 70th anniversay sale’