Editor’s note: We’re taking a break from our usual “Future classics” format to share the annual “Hagerty Hot List,” the classic car insurer’s yearly list of new cars it thinks will become collectible within the next 25 years.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – With so much attention focused on the record-breaking classic car sales and their rapidly increasing values, many enthusiasts often wonder which cars of today will be collectible down the road. Always keeping an eye on the market, the collector car experts at Hagerty release their annual list of vehicles that stand out as likely being collectibles within the next 25 years.

In order to be considered for the Hagerty Hot List, the vehicle must be produced within the 2014 model year with an MSRP of less than $100,000. Special consideration is given to newly launched versions not appearing on previous Hagerty Hot Lists.

“Most new car news focuses on the latest interactive technology, alternative power sources, and the race to increased efficiency,” said McKeel Hagerty, president and CEO of Hagerty. “But for a car to be collectible in the future, it has to be cool right off the assembly line. A collectible car has to grab you and not let you go.”

The 2014 Hagerty Hot List (with base prices)

1.  Jaguar F-Type R ($99,000) – The British marque makes a triumphant return to the sports car scene with the growling F-Type. Boasting a healthy V8 engine and rear drive platform, the F-Type will surely be a driving enthusiast choice soon enough.
2. BMW M5 Sedan ($92,900) – A performance-oriented sedan with an old school manual transmission is quickly becoming an extinct species. While more drivers shun the thought of using three pedals, we applaud BMW for keeping this option alive in this segment.

   

3. Chevrolet COPO Camaro ($90,000) – Chevrolet basically guarantees future collectability of the drag-strip ready COPO Camaro by limiting production to 69 units. It is only appropriate that the first production model will be sold at the upcoming Barrett-Jackson auction in Arizona.
4. Maserati Ghibli S ($75,000) – The Ghibli returns for a third time, and this time as a four door. The twin turbochargers feeding the 410 horsepower 3.0 liter V6 ensures the Ghibli is more than just pretty curves.
5. Alfa Romeo 4C ($54,000) – A budget-friendly Italian sports car might sound like an oxymoron, but the 4C is saying all the right words. With a carbon fiber tub leading to a curb weight of just more than 2,100 pounds, this sporty two-seater isn’t pulling any punches as it aims at the U.S. market.
6. Chevrolet Corvette ($51,000) – The Corvette is the most popularly collected vehicle in the U.S. so GM had no choice but to make the new C7 great. It is a nice mix of Corvette heritage with real world performance figures and technology goodies. Dollar for dollar this is the best performance buy on the market.
7. Nissan 370Z NISMO ($43,000) – The Nissan Z car has amassed a following and the 370Z NISMO is the latest and greatest in this lineage. With Japanese cars now representing a standalone class of collectables in a way that we have not seen in the past, 350 and 370Zs will not be ignored by collectors in years to come.
8. Dodge Challenger Shaker ($36,995) – While the styling of the new Challenger has always harkened to the glory days of muscle cars, nothing says horsepower wars like a bulging hood scoop. Dodge went back to the roots and added the iconic shaker hood to atop of a healthy HEMI engine and R/T options package. We will take ours in Plum Crazy Pearl.
9.  Jeep Wrangler Rubicon X ($35,095) – Vintage SUV’s are the fastest-growing segment and Jeep leads that pack. While more comfortable than its bare bones workhorse ancestor, the Rubicon X is highly capable for not a lot of money. Many of these now compete at events, which means they will one day command respect at vintage off-road demonstrations.
10. Ford Fiesta ST ($21,400) – Following the enthusiasm surrounding the Focus ST, the little brother Fiesta ST has been pumping the same iron. Youthful buyers attracted to compact cars don’t always want to sacrifice performance. The Fiesta looks, sounds and acts the part of a modern day enthusiast’s car.

Editor’s note, part 2: So, do you agree with the Hagerty Hot List? Let us know what you’d add or subtract in the Share your thoughts! section below.

We tease that Barrett-Jackson’s annual Scottsdale auction is the circus among classic car sales. There are vendors hawking all sorts of products that would seem to have nothing to do with classic cars. There are tire-squealing joyrides not in classic cars but in the newest of high-performance vehicles.

And while there may not be a big-cat animal trainer, this year there will be cowboys riding bucking bulls and, if you like your animals a little more contented, there’s a merry-go-round — oops, we mean a classic 1922 Spillman Engineering Corp 40 Menagerie Carousel — that will go up for bidding.

Yes, it’s easy to tease about Barrett-Jackson being like Barnum & Bailey, but let’s get serious for a moment. Being the big show isn’t the only thing that sets Barrett-Jackson apart from the other classic car auctions.

Too often overlooked amid the big crowds, big celebrities, big sales and the TV showmanship is the money Barrett-Jackson raises for charities.

As Barrett-Jackson’s 43rd annual Scottsdale auction begins, the company reports that it has generated more than $60 million for charitable causes.

Tonight at the auction’s opening gala, two celebrities hope to boost that total. Actor Billy Baldwin will offer a 2015 Super Bowl package to benefit the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund and drag racing star Warren Johnson will sell his 1987 Oldsmobile Firenza pro stock race car to benefit the Darrell Gwynn Foundation.

Darrell Gwynn’s Foundation has become a favorite with Barrett-Jackson and its community of bidders. Gwynn was a drag racer who was severely injured in a crash. Since then, he has had to use a wheelchair and his charity raises money to provide high-tech, customized wheelchairs to children who need them. Such chairs can cost as much as $40,000 and the foundation donates as many as 50 of them each year.

And those are just for starters. For example, Friday eventing, rocker Gene Simmons will be on hand to sell a 1956 Ford F-100 pickup truck customized by Carroll Shelby to raise money for The Children’s Hospital Foundation of Saskatchewan Foundation.

During the week-long auction, vehicles including an airplane will be sold for the benefit of charities, including The Armed Forces Foundation.

“The team here at Barrett-Jackson gets a special lift out of the impact our auctions have on charities across the country and how we have been able to help so many causes from children to veterans to life-threatening conditions,” Barrett-Jackson president Steve Davis said in a statement. “It makes each auction special.”

“It’s one of the most fulfilling aspects of the word we do,” said Craig Jackson, company CEO and chairman whose parents and the Barrett family staged their first classic car shows to benefit local charities. Those early Barrett and Jackson events were the Fiesta de los Autos Elegantes, annual classic car shows and parades held in the 1960s to raise money for Scottsdale’s art center and to buy books for the community library.

Not only does Barrett-Jackson waive its usual commissions on charity cars, it is not unusual for bidders to spend well into six figures on a charity car, and then turn around and put it up for bidding again, just to generate even more money for a worthy cause.

And it’s not always a car that is the reward for the winning bid. For example, at the auction this year, Barrett-Jackson and Bugatti will accept bids to benefit Make-A-Wish Arizona. The winning bid doesn’t get a car, but two people will get the ultimate Bugatti test drive, flying to France, visiting the birthplace of Bugatti cars, seeing the factory where the Bugatti Vitesse is built and getting to drive a Vitesse at the Paul Ricard Grand Prix racing circuit at Le Castellet.

Previously, this Bugatti test drive experience in France has been available only to Bugatti owners.

 

For many people, the annual classic car auction week in Arizona presents a wonderful opportunity (1) to escape way-too-cold weather and (2) to buy or sell classic cars. But for many more people, the auctions are simply one of the biggest and best classic and exotic car shows on the planet.

For example, where else can you see not one, not two, but nine Mercedes-Benz 300SLs, including five with gull-wing doors?

Where else can you see 39 Ferraris, including a 1951 212 Export Berlinetta and a 1952 212 Inter Coupe, as well as four 250 GTs, one of them a California Spider?

Or three Model J Duesenbergs?

Or cars with bodywork by not only by Touring, Franay, Zagato, Scaglietti, Vignale, Bertone, Ghia, Murphy, LeBaron, Brewster, Mulliner, Gangloff, Chapron, Figoni et Falachi, Scaglietti and all the Farinas — Stablimenti, Pinin and Pininfarina — but by the Rippon Brothers and the Ringbrothers?

Or cars formerly or currently owned by the likes of Nick Cage, Gregory Peck, Ray Milland, Roy Rogers, John Dodge (that’s Dodge as in the car company), James Gandolfini, Winthrop Rockefeller, Richard Carpenter, Simon Cowell,  Matthew Fox, Rudolph Valentino’s manager, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Carroll Shelby or even Dr. Jonas Salk?

You also can see (or even buy) the Testarossa used in Michael Jackson’s Bad Pepsi promo and the herringbone tweed jacket Steve McQueen wore in Bullitt.

There are a Bugatti that raced at Monaco in 1930, the Osca that won the Index of Performance at Sebring in 1960, one of Jim Hall’s 1966 Chaparral 1 racers, Shelby’s race-winning 1963 King Cobra racer, Donna Mae Mims’ pink H-Production national championship 1959 Austin-Healey Sprite, the “longtail” McLaren F1 GTR Global GT racer, a Sox & Martin A/FX Hemi ‘Cuda, the 1998 Ferrari F300 that Michael Schumacher and Eddie Irvine used for testing, and not only the Snake & Mongoose funny cars but the trucks that carried them to the drag strips.

And those numbers and those lists come only from perusing the thick, glossy, printed and heavy catalogs for the RM, Gooding & Co., Bonhams and Barrett-Jackson Salon Collection/Series 5000 portion of the Arizona auction week.

We have yet to click through Russo and Steele’s 409-page online catalog or the ginormous printed catalog for the rest of Barrett-Jackson’s 1400-car docket. And don’t forget that Mitch Silver will have an additional 350 or so vehicles out at Fort McDowell for your viewing (and even bidding) pleasure.

Nor do those numbers include the cars to be arrayed around the lawns at the Arizona Biltmore for the inaugural Arizona Concours d’Elegance that kicks off auction week on Sunday.

Another in a series of previews of classic car auctions in January

Mitch Silver likes his niche in the classic car marketplace.

“It’s great to see million-dollar cars, but I’m not a participant there and most everybody I know isn’t either,” said the college professor turned auctioneer (see photo) who founded his classic car sales company some 36 years ago.

“I go [to the other auctions and] look at those cars, but then I come back where I can play,” Silver added.

Where Silver and his customers play is with cars priced not at seven-figure elevations, or even rarely at six, but in the five-figure range. Last year at his 16th annual January auction in the Phoenix area, the average sale price at Silver’s event was right around $14,000.

“I look at the sales that grab the headlines, but I don’t see myself ever collecting those cars, and that’s the case for a lot of people,” Silver said at the time. “They’re fun to see and to talk about, but what I’m looking for is to buy a 1950s convertible or muscle car.”

Silver’s annual January sale at the Fort McDowell resort and casino in Fountain Hills will offer 350 — or a few more — vehicles over two days of bidding. While some of the high-end auction houses tout vintage Ferraris, rare Duesenbergs and gull-wing Mercedes 300SLs, Silver’s headliners include:

• a 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser,
• a 1960 Plymouth Fury convertible,
• a 1963 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop,
• a wonderfully preserved, “rock stock” 1956 Chevrolet BelAir convertible,
• a 1940 Mercury coupe,
• “a lot of nice trucks,”
• “early Ford V8 convertibles.”

In other words, classics that are affordable, that fun to drive and to take to local car shows right now, and that could be candidates for restoration somewhere down the road.

Photos courtesy Silver Auctions

Silver always liked old cars and had bought and sold a few, including some he chased others down in barns and backyards. Then he saw an advertisement for a classic car auction in Seattle.

“I went and it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen,” he said.

Silver went back to Spokane, staged his own auction, and then others and 10 years later he left Eastern Washington University and turned Silver Auctions into a full-time business.

But he’s never really left teaching behind. As each car crosses the block at his auction, he often shares the history of the marque, the model, or even the specific vehicle.

Where else, he’s said, can you sit down and have a classic car come past you every three minutes and have someone who knows about those cars tell you the vehicles’s history and technical information?

“It’s a very efficient way of shopping,” he said, adding that all the while, “you’re learning.”

To make that shopping more efficient, Silver trimmed what used to be a four-day auction to two days.

“We’re running about the same number of cars,” he said. “We just made longer days.”

This year, he’s also streamlining the opening hour of his sale, which is devoted to automobilia.

“We tried to pack a little too much into that hour in the past,” he said of trying to push through as many as 120 items in an hour. “We’re backing that down to 60 to 70 items this year. We have a lot of pressed-tin toys, some real nice stuff, and all at no reserve.”

But Silver won’t be the only one selling automobilia on the Fort McDowell property this month. The new Automobilia Scottsdale, a room full of vendors, will be set up in the resort ballroom not far from Silver’s auction tent.

“I think that is outstanding,” Silver said. “I’ve very happy to have more activities there and new people coming. I’ll be over there taking a look myself.”

Silver also said that he’s eager for those attending the new sale to discover “that Fort McDowell is close [to Scottsdale] and easy to get to.”

And, he might have added, a place to buy very reasonably priced classic cars.