Quentin Willson
Ditch your cloak of doom and embrace the silver lining of these uncertain times – that classic you thought you missed may be back within reach
heralds the affordability of a falling market with bargain Mercedes
I’m loving this new era of retro-priced classics. There was a time – we all remember it painfully well – when almost everything felt so out of reach. So untouchably expensive. We watched the cars we coveted and desired disappear into a remote, well-heeled world. But many are now leaving the heated motor houses of erstwhile investors and coming back to us. One upside of the global economic softening is that some cars are selling for the sort of money we saw years ago. Right now smart enthusiasts are buying at prices they can’t believe.
Take H&H’S October sale in Duxford. A very original and unmolested dark blue ’69 Daimler 420 Sovereign, just out of longterm family ownership and with 70,000 miles plus original bill of sale and factory warranty card made just £3600. Or how about a very tidy ’72 RR Silver Shadow in Masons Black with 57,000 miles and a fan of specialist servicing bills for only £4500? An ex-guernsey, ’82 R107 280SL with 100k, 21 stamps in the book and only three owners made £7875. In blue with hardtop and all books and tools, it was sharp, fresh, shiny and very usable. Both its Ferrari 308s felt good value too. A brace of left hookers – one a rare factory Bianco white ’83 GTBI with 39k, extensive history and the other a red ’82 GTSI with 43k – sold for £33,750 apiece. Meanwhile a blue rhd 2000 Ferrari 456 auto with 46k and good history made a very reasonable £39,375 – or half of what they were selling for four years ago.
In October Bonhams MPH at Bicester sold a silver ’99 Aston DB7 Volante with 60k, three owners and service history for £17,916 (coupés used to be advertised for that), a black 2004 Mercedes SL55 AMG with 89,000 miles, long history and £18k worth of bills for £12,937, and a lovely older restoration ’64, right-hook, Uk-supplied Mercedes 230SL Pagoda with 80,000 miles for £38,250. That’s the price we used to be told that tired ex-us projects were worth.
And the more you spend, the greater the opportunity. H&H’S ’74 Dino 246GT with just 10,000 warranted miles from new, an unimpeachable history and in completely original, perfect, never-driven-in-the-rain, unrestored nick made £303,750. In the boom years that would have had a halfmillion pound ticket stuck to its screen.
Bonham’s Zoute sale in Belgium had a glorious ’76 Porsche 930 Turbo in Viper Green metallic with the rare sunroof and aircon-delete option, completely restored and beautiful, chassis number 66 of the ’76 model year – it sold for £101,534. The earliest 930 Turbos are collector-grade Porsche icons and back in 2013/14 you would have expected such a desirable spec, year and colour combo to make £200k.
Bonhams’ Pagoda was very special too. Formerly owned by Dutch privateer racer Carel Godin de Beaufort, this ’63 launchyear 230SL, chassis 249, and with matching numbers, period hill climb competition history, photographs and documented provenance, was a steal for such a historic early SL at a mere £59,534.
So throw off your cloak of doom, look at the numbers and you’ll realise that we haven’t seen classics this cheap for ages. And this new value structure buys plenty of special irreplaceable examples too. I’m going to take a deep breath and venture that maybe, just maybe, we’ve come to the bottom of the value correction curve and the market could now be starting to stabilise. Here’s hoping.