A slow Beaulieu for Bonhams
Otherwise tough day sees record price paid for Escort Mexico
Bonhams’ auction held alongside the Beaulieu Autojumble included its typically eclectic mix of cars for this sale. It offered a lot or pre-war content and many more projects than you see in most of its sales. But being different failed to excite sufficiently to draw in the bidders and the final result was a pretty average 70%. Even that’s not as good as it might look because the bulk of the cars sold were either offered with no reserve or went for below the low end of their estimates.
That includes the ‘poster car’ for the sale – a 1948 Delahaye 135M Drophead Coupe. With good history and little used since a £200k restoration 15 years ago, it was offered with a £250-300k estimate. We’d certainly concur with the lower end of that but the car was actually bought for just £153,125, which looks very low but was obviously enough for the vendor to wave it goodbye.
Just 13 of the 118 cars on offer topped their high estimates and the shining star amongst those was the pictured 1978 Ford Escort Mexico MKII. It was one of just 2500 built, which is a raindrop in the Thames alongside the UK total of 631,828 MKII Escorts. It was also exceedingly fresh, with only five miles covered since a painstaking restoration with original parts that left it better than anything that left the factory. It sold for £42,187, which is £10,000 above our top book value for them but we don’t cater for exceptions like this.
It was also a record price for the model at auction, beating the £38,250 achieved by a similarly well restored example at Silverstone Auctions’ NEC sale in 2018. Fast Fords are rarely a bad investment.