Monthly musings from Jay Leno, Derek Bell, Stephen Bayley and Robert Coucher
The Collector
There’s no better way to buy an old car than from the original owner. I hear from a lot of relatives of guys who had something interesting and unusual in the garage, but have passed on. The family don’t know what to do with it and have no idea what it’s worth. Ususally it’s pretty ordinary stuff, but every now and then you get a good one.
A woman wrote to me a while back. Her husband had died 18 years ago and he had a Ferrari she wanted to sell. It hadn’t been run for years but her husband had said it was worth at least $400,000. I called her up for a chat, and I asked her what model Ferrari it was. Over the phone I could tell she was reading from a paper.
She said it was a 1967 Ferrari, said the number 275 and then: ‘It looks like the letters GTB. Does that sound right?’ He had paid $7500 for it in the early ’70s and used it as his everyday car. Then, when he became ill, they just parked it. She knew $400,000 was an awful lot of money for a car, but that’s what he’d said it was worth.
With the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, I pondered. Realising I had been very lucky in my life, I took a deep breath and I said to her: ‘I’ll give you $400,000 for it, but your car is worth at least three million.’
I asked if she’d checked Ferrari prices recently, but she said no. I told her I knew an auctioneer who would sell it for her, and if she got over $3m for it, she’d have to bake me some chocolate-chip cookies. She thought that was fair. The car made $3.75 million. One thing I’ve found to be true is that whatever vehicle you’re looking for, it’s probably within a couple of hundred miles of Los Angeles. The climate, the movie industry and the large number of engineers in the aircraft industry and the software development business make it a treasure-trove of cool stuff. Vehicles I have a special fondness for are one-owner and unrestored. It takes a special type of person to keep a car and maintain it properly for 20-plus years.
Three days ago someone contacted me about purchasing her 1966 Lincoln Continental convertible. It was not a car I had considered, but to be polite I called her back. She sounded extremely elderly and she lived in Beverly Hills, in a classic Beverly Hills house built in the 1920s when cost was no object. And Beverly Hills cars are always interesting because they’re usually garaged and well maintained.
Turns out this woman and her husband were the original owners. This huge American land yacht was a four-door convertible with suicide doors in the rear. It had never been in an accident or damaged in any way and, best of all, it was just three miles from my house.
Unlike the Ferrari lady, this elderly gal knew exactly what she had. She’d called a number of auction houses and had been given fairly high estimates, so no bargains to be had here. So the car had to be good, and it was.
The Continental top mechanism is one of the most complicated in the world. You hold down the switch, the boot opens backwards and folds itself in half while the top goes through a series of complicated gyrations trying to fit itself inside. I heard these were a nightmare but this one worked perfectly. The leather interior looked five or six years old, and the suicide doors in the back opened and closed perfectly. One or two shopping-trolley dings apart, the car was almost perfect.
Original unrestored cars are not like modern cars to drive. I’d been driving Porsches, Corvettes and McLarens, and the Lincoln’s complete lack of road feel actually made me smile. As you float down the highway, steering with one finger, you feel like the landlord going to collect the rent. Needless to say, I bought the car on the spot.
The last years of these four-door convertibles were 1966 and 1967, and they were the best years because the cars finally had front disc brakes. You need them, because the thing weighs almost three tons.
Powered by an enormous 462ci engine putting out 340bhp, it has a three-speed automatic transmission and is a torque monster. Fuel mileage is nothing to write home about, but that’s OK because your whole view of society changes when you drive this thing. People smile, nobody cuts you off.
I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for almost 30 years and this car was three miles from my house. How had I not seen it? What other treasures lurk just a few feet from my door? As I pulled the Lincoln into my driveway, I pondered on that. And then I polished off the world’s most expensive chocolate-chip cookies.
‘IF SHE GOT OVER $3M FOR IT, SHE’D HAVE TO BAKE ME SOME CHOCOLATECHIP COOKIES. SHE THOUGHT THAT FAIR’