PRESERVE, AND REAP THE REWARDS
Provenance is all, says respected auction yearbook celebrating 25 years
The 25th anniversary edition of the Classic Car Auction Yearbook, which has recorded and analysed the past 12 months of auction activities around the world, was published last month.
Authored by Adolfo Orsi and Raffaele Gazzi, the large-format book charts sales results from around the world, broken down by make and model into hard statistics; 528 cars from a total of 308 marques are included.
For example, the US owned half of the market in 2003, but that grew to two thirds this year. Cars from the book’s defined classic period (19461966) made up $441m (£339m) translating into 36.66 per cent of overall sales.
The fi gures are startling – today’s old car industry is worth $1.2 billion – and growing in terms of cars coming to market. Crucially, some of that number growth is being driven by vendors willing to offers cars without reserve. Originality is king.
Adolfo Orsi said: ‘The results show that provenance, together with history, reputation of the restoration shop and authoritativeness of the research are acquiring a much more signifi cant weight than in the past.
‘This signal, together with more attention to the quality and condition of the car, is to be interpreted as a positive sign in the cultural growth of our sector.’
For those who must have their high-price statistics, perhaps the most interesting is that the top 226 cars (5.65 percent of those listed) are more valuable than the remaining 4002 put together.
The book devotes some of its initial pages to the year’s Top Ten and of those, six are Ferraris, with a 1962
250 GTO taking the number one spot. For those interested, it sold for a cool £37.673m.
Those who watch the top end of the market might be surprised at the car taking the number two slot; far from being a post-war European grand tourer, it’s a 1935 Duesenberg Model SSJ roadster, delivered new to actor Gary Cooper and later forming part of the Briggs Cunningham Collection. Gooding and Co sold it for the equivalent of £17m.