The simplicity of the Volkswagen beetle, such as this 1968 sedan, has wide appeal. (Photo: Volkswagen)
‘Vee Dub: Bohemian Beauties” is the unlikely name for a new exhibit at LeMay-America’s Car Museum that focuses on the little car that could: the classic Volkswagen in all its glory.
Opening Saturday, Jan. 11 with a public unveiling at the Tacoma, Wash., museum, the show features examples from private collectors and the museum’s own collection of Ferdinand Porsche’s simple “people’s car” that took the world by storm.
Volkswagen of America, which is partnering with LeMay in producing the exhibit, has lent three rare and significant VWs:
KdF-Wagen — Only a handful of KdF-Wagens were produced between 1941 and 1945 for use by the German army. The fully restored vehicle contains more than 95 percent of the original KdF parts.
Panel Delivery Type 2 — The panel-delivery variation of the rear-engine sedan was ideal for loading and transporting cargo with its large double cargo doors and low floor. Today, it is an enduring collector’s item.
Wedding Car Beetle — Volkswagen de Mexico built two of these wrought-iron-bodied beetles in recognition of the uniquely artistic effort by a private customizer in Mexico during the 1960s.
“We are excited to collaborate with Volkswagen to celebrate a car brand that has defined a culture of customization and entrepreneurship,” said David Madeira, president and CEO of the museum.
The opening Saturday includes a movie marathon showing three The Love Bug films featuring Herbie, the sentient VW race car.
The Vee Dub show also has a social media element: tell your own unique Volkswagen stories under the hashtag #VWACM. The best stories will be on digital display at the exhibit.
Mitch Silver likes his niche in the classic car marketplace.
Photo by Larry Edsall
“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.
Don’t worry, no classic cars were harmed in the making of Swiss artist Fabian Oefner’s images.
Oefner is known for his ability to fuse art and science. His latest work involves classic cars — their creation and their destruction.
“What you see in these images is a moment that never existed in real life,” he said in a news release from the MF&B M.A.D. Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, where Oefner’s work is on display through May. (M.A.D. is short for Mechanical Art Devices.)
“What looks like a car falling apart is in fact a moment in time that has been created artificially by blending hundreds of individual images together. There is a unique pleasure about artificially baulking a moment… Freezing a moment in time is stupefying.”
The images in Oefner’s Disintegrating series show the demise of three classic sports cars — a 1967 Ferrari 330 P4, a 1961 Jaguar E-type coupe and a 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300 SRL Uhlenhaut coupe.
On the other hand, his Hatch series explores “the birth of a car” as if the car was actually hatching.
Oefner said Hatch was inspired by an image he saw of a hatching chick. He wanted to explore how it might look if a manufactured object was born like a living organism. His choice of object was a Ferrari 250 GTO.
For Disintegrating, the news release reports, Oefner “first sketched on paper where the individual pieces would go, before taking apart the model cars piece by piece, from the body shell right down to the minuscule screws. Each car contained over a thousand components.
“Then, according to his initial sketch, he placed each piece individually with the aid of fine needles and pieces of string. After meticulously working out the angle of each shot and establishing the right lighting, he photographed the component, and took thousands of photographs to create each Disintegrating image.
“All these individual photos were then blended together in post-production to create one single image. With the wheels acting as a reference point, each part was masked in Photoshop, cut and then pasted into the final image.
“These are possibly the ‘slowest high-speed’ images ever captured,” he said. “It took almost two months to create an image that looks as if it was captured in a fraction of a second. The whole disassembly in itself took more than a day for each car due to the complexity of the models. But that’s a bit of a boy thing. There’s an enjoyment in the analysis, discovering something by taking it apart, like peeling an onion.”
In Hatch, Oefner “presents his interpretation of how cars might be ‘born’. The first two images show a Ferrari 250 GTO – again a detailed scale model – breaking out of its shell. The third image shows one of the empty shells left behind among several others yet to hatch”
Oefner started with a latex mold of the model car. The mold was filled with a thin layer of gypsum to create a shell.
“Several dozens of these shells were made in order to complete the next step: smashing the shell onto the car to create the illusion of the vehicle breaking out. This step had to be repeated a great many times until the desired results were achieved.
“To capture the very moment where the shell hit the model, Fabian connected a microphone to his camera, a Hasselblad H4D, and flashes, so that every time the shell hit the surface of the car, the impulse was picked up by the microphone which then triggered the flashes and the camera shutter.
Oefner, who turns 30 in 2014, was 14 when he saw Harold Edgerton’s photo of a bullet piercing an apple. The photo inspired Oefner to buy his first camera.
“I have always experimented with all different kinds of art forms,” he said. “Photography turned out to be the form of art that I was most interested in.”
His previous work includes photographing “nebulae’”formed in a fiberglass lamp and bursting balloons filled with corn starch. He has photographed crystals of color rising in reaction to a speaker’s sound waves, captured the patterns created by magnetic ferrofluids pushing paint into canals, and taken color-crazy photos of paint modeled by centripetal forces.
“I am trying to show these phenomena in an unseen and poetic way,” he pauses, “and therefore make the viewer pause for a moment and appreciate the magic that constantly surrounds us.”
Oefner shared his ideas and artwork during a TED Talk, which includes several of his non-automotive of his images.
Remember the inaugural Motostalgia Auction d’Elegance staged in Austin, Texas, back in November to coincide with the U.S. Grand Prix? We’ve been waiting for a final news release from the organizers, but they’ve chosen to send us only a list of results and a few photos.
It appears from the list that 180 vehicles were offered up for bidding, and that all but 26 sold. Among the bids declined by car owners who had higher reserves were $1.5 million for a 1933 Duesenberg Model J Franay “Queen of Diamonds” and $900,000 for the 1998 Ferrari F300 F1 racer driven by Michael Schumacher.
Among vehicles that sold, the 1950 Cisitalia-Abarth 204A raced by Tazio Nuvolari brought $4.62 million.
No other vehicles exceeded $300,000. A 1931 Pur Sang Bugatti Type 51 recreation sold for $297,000 and a 1957 Porsche Speedster sold for $275,000.
After back-to-back auctions at Monterey and Las Vegas, Drew Alcazar says his Phoenix-based team at Russo and Steele may have been tired, but “the great thing was to see how excited everyone was to come home and work on Scottsdale.”
And it’s not just his own team he finds excited about his company’s January 15-19 auction of European sports, American muscle, hot rods and customs.
“We may eclipse 750 cars,” Alcazar said, adding that consignments still are flowing in, to the point that he and his crew are busy trying to figure out how to make room for them all.
But even before the influx of cars, “We brought in some new people, people who have the capability of taking us to the next level,” Alcazar said. “It’s another testament of our success, bringing on a lot more resources, doing better customer service. That’s exciting for me.”
Russo and Steele needed additional staff because Alcazar doubled up on the auction schedule last year, adding events in Orange County, Calif., and Las Vegas to the usual lineup of Scottsdale and Monterey.
“It was quite an adventure for the gang, and a big learning curve, but they did a great job, particularly with Las Vegas just 30 days after Monterey,” Alcazar said.
The company’s 2014 auction schedule again is for four events, including Newport Beach in June, Monterey in August and Las Vegas in September. First, however, comes Russo and Steele’s 14th Scottsdale auction.
“We have the best collection of cars that we have had since the 2010 anniversary year,” Alcazar said. “Not that I want to dredge that horse out of the grave again. That year was our coming out year. It was our 10th anniversary. The cars were impressive. Russo and Steele had arrived. To have it in a wad and a mud puddle was devastating [a tornado-like storm felled tents and battered many cars], but at least everyone got out alive.
“Now we’re not just back, but we’re going forward,” he added. “It started last year with the two new events. Now the inventory we have at Scottsdale is probably the best evidence.”
The increase in staff strength is additional evidence, he said, and will free Alcazar to do strategic planning and to focus on clients.
“I’m just another car guy,” Alcazar said. “To me it is a hobby. But there’s a time to look at the business model, to bring in more business acumen.”
Alcazar knows where Russo and Steele fits within the classic car auction industry. Yes, he likes having a car or two sell for seven figures, but he knows people come to his auctions for what he calls the “$50,000 to $500,000 sweet spot” of the market, and especially for European sports cars in that price range.
Yet it is two cars that could exceed that range that may provide the highlights of Russo and Steele’s Scottsdale auction.
Lamborghini 350GT | Courtesy Russo and Steele
“Our most exciting European sports car is the [1966 Lamborghini] 350GT, especially on the heels of how well Rob [Myers of RM Auctions] did with one and how we did with the DB6 at Newport Beach.”
RM Auctions sold a 1965 350 GT coupe with Touring Superleggera bodywork for $550,000 last April. A 1968 Aston Martin DB6 brought a record $456,500 at Russo and Steele’s inaugural Orange County sale.
The 350GT up for bidding at Scottsdale is an early production model with Touring coachwork and an engine-turned machined steering wheel and dash surround.
“The Birdcage Maserati is a bit of a calculated risk,” Alcazar said, explaining that the 1959 Maserati Tipo 61 “bird cage” being offered at Scottsdale is the serial number 2459 car built for Briggs Cunningham’s racing team and driven to three victories in 1960 by Walt Hansgen. But it also was the car that crashed heavily in 1962 at Daytona.
Years later, the car was reconstructed by an Italian collector and in 2010 was granted its FIA Historical Technical Passport, making it eligible for international vintage racing events. Last year the car won its class at the Keels & Wheels concours in Texas and has been invited to Amelia Island in 2014.
“It has a new skin, new chassis, new drivetrain,” Alcazar said. “You’re not going to put a 100-percent original Birdcage on the track, but this car may be even more enticing if you want to go vintage racing.”
Photo gallery images courtesy Russo and Steele
Other headline vehicles for the Russo and Steele auction include:
* a 1969 Yenko Chevrolet Camaro:
* a 1971 Chevrolet Corvette LS6 convertible;
* the Hemi-powered 1965 McKee sports racer built for Richard Petty to drive in the Can-Am series (he ended up drag racing instead);
* a 1972 Ford Torino raced by Bud Moore’s NASCAR team;
* a 1969 Shelby GT350 SCCA B-Production racer.
But Alcazar — after all, he’s just a car guy — gets just as excited when he talks about car such as a 1973 Porsche 911S owned by the same family since new, a Targa-topped 1980 Toyota Celica Sunchaser, and a 1968 Saab 96.
“It will be fun to be on the block with these cars,” he said.
The prancing horse. The triton. The bow tie. The double chevrons. The three-pointed star. Four interlocked circles. One circle but divided into four pie-shaped sections, two blue, two white, to create the illusion of a spinning airplane propeller. Henry Ford’s signature, or at least his last name, enclosed within a blue oval.
No doubt, each of those simple descriptions triggers an image in your mind, an image of an automaker’s badge, the emblem it puts on each of its vehicles. In many ways, a company’s self-image placed proudly for all to see. Through the years, automotive badges evolve, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically. And sometimes they simply seem to fade away as an automaker or one of its brands ceases production. Just as there are classic cars, so too there are classic badges. We like to collect them, at least photographs of them, which we’ll be sharing with you from time to time.
Believe it or not, the first hammer of the first sale at the first auction of 2014 falls sometime today, at Dave Rupp’s Fort Lauderdale Beach sale in Florida.
But as the auction action starts anew in a new year, it can be entertaining if not enlightening to take a quick look back at one interesting snapshot of 2013. That snapshot comes in the form of a delightful “Year at a Glance” chart put together by the folks at RM Auctions.
Note: This chart involves only those auctions organized by RM. Nonetheless, it offers a perspective on the classic car hobby and industry that’s noteworthy — and then some.
For example, if you parked nose to tail all of the 879 vehicles sold last year by RM — and those 879 vehicles include a 1932 Garwood boat that was 28 feet in length — they’d form a single line 2.5 miles long.
Of those 879 vehicles, 288 — nearly one out of three — sold for more than their pre-sale estimates.
Bidding on cars and automobilia at RM sales was done by 3,779 people from 52 countries, which makes it a good thing that RM auctioneer Max Girado not only speaks English but is fluent in French, Spanish and Italian as well.
By the way, Girado also is an RM car specialist, which means he not only knows about cars, but he drives them, and drives them passionately. Last year, RM staffers participated in a dozen classic car rallies.
To get to those rallies and to vintage races and to their various auctions last year, RM staffers flew more than 1.5 million miles.
Speaking of miles, the longest distance a car traveled to be auctioned by RM was 6,738 miles. Based on restrictions imposed by classic car insurers, we’re guessing that car was flown, not driven, from its garage to the auction venue.
What was the most popular color among the 879 vehicles sold last year by RM? Red.
But that probably comes as no surprise if you look at what appears to be a bar code in the lower lefthand corner of the chart and realize that those bars represent the sales for 2013 by marque (based on dollars, not number of vehicles). By far the brand generating the most dollars/euros/pounds was Ferrari, followed by Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, Duesenberg and Porsche.
Those brands comprised the top five. Next came Jaguar, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, Talbot-Lago and Shelby. Rounding out the top 20 were Packard, Cadillac, Ford, Bugatti, Delahaye, Chrysler, Chevrolet, McLaren, Lamborghini and — how’s this for a surprise — Toyota!
Who says Japanese cars aren’t emerging as collectible classics?
So, those are my reactions to the RM chart. What about it caught your eye? And who out there volunteers to produce a similar chart at the end of 2014 rounding up not just one auction company’s results but all the classic car auctions?
When Tony Singer was a college student in Denver in the late 1960s, he went to the local Porsche dealership, not to buy but to look and to dream.
“You’re a young kid. They know you’re not buying.” Singer said of the dealership’s sales staff. “What do they do? They give you a poster.”
Singer put that poster on his wall, and a year after his graduation he was back at the dealership, this time buying a used Porsche 356.
“I started collecting thing related to Porsche,” Singer said. “I always kept my Porsche, but as I had other cars I’d collect things related to them, too, particularly posters.”
Singer’s poster collection grew, and grew some more, but always remained a hobby. While working as an artist and printer, he also restored and showed cars (a Porsche 550 Spyder he restored is now part of Ralph Lauren’s collection).
Singer bought some of his posters at automobilia shows in Europe, events at which a variety of vendors sold various car-related collectibles. When he suggested to some British poster vendors they stage such a show in the U.S., they suggested Singer do it himself.
So he did, and thus was born Automobilia Monterey, held now for more than a dozen years in conjunction with those historic races and the Pebble Beach concours d’elegance. Automobilia Monterey has grown in to an event which annually features nearly four dozen vendors and attracts some 1500 customer/collectors.
“It’s only collectibles,” he said. “They don’t come for wine or food or pretty women or all the other stuff. They are people who know very precisely why they’re there, who have a pretty good idea of what they’re going to find, and it’s really become it’s own cool little event. It’s become a gathering of similarly minded people and has an energy that’s all its own.”
On January 16 and 17, Singer launches a second such showcase, Automobilia Scottsdale, from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. each day in the ballroom of the Radisson Ft. McDowell resort, where original — no reproductions allowed — posters, photographs, rally plates, badges, pins, mascots, hood ornaments, signs, scale models, literature, books, original art and other auto-related collectibles will be offered for sale by more than a dozen vendors.
“We have a great mix of people with a wide variety of offerings,” Singer said. “One has badges. One has mascots. One has books. When the buyer walks in, they have a broad palette of things to choose. They may be looking for one thing, but then they see other things.”
Singer said prices typically start in the $10 range. “Most automobile tends to be less than $100,” he said, adding, however, that there will be items priced at as much as $15,000.”
We’ve already shared some information on the MidAmerica/Mecum motorcycle auction taking place January 9-11 at south end of The Strip in Las Vegas, but that sale has a competitor on its opening day, Bonhams’ annual classic motorcycle sale at Bally’s Hotel & Casino.
Bonhams’ sale will include an Isle of Man winner and a BMW factory racer credited with changing American minds about Bimmer bikes.
The 1947 Vincent HRD Series B Rapide that won the 1950 Isle of Man Clubman TT beneath Alex Phillip will be up for bidding. Estimated to be worth as much as $150,000, after its big victory, the bike was uprated to full Black Lightning specifications — Phillip called it a “rocketship” — an was sold to British commando and war hero Lt. Colonel “Mad Jack” Churchill.
The 1972 Butler & Smith BMW F750 is one of two purpose-built, factory-supplied racing bikes sent to tuner Udo Geitl of Butler & Smith, the BMW motorcycle importers for the United States. Geitl’s tweaks produced stunningly faster bikes that raced in the 1973 Daytona 200 and helped to change the image of BMW motorcycles in the U.S. from “stuffy tourer” to sporting machine.
The F750s also were predecessors to the Butler & Smith BMW R90S model that Geitl readied and that Reg Pridmore rode to the first world Superbike championship.
The F750 up for bidding was ridden at Daytona by Kurt Leibmann while Pridmore rode its twin. Pre-auction estimated value is as much as $75,000.
“We are very pleased to have been selected to represent these historic motorcycles at auction,” said Nick Smith, motorcycle manager for Bonhams U.S. Motoring Division. “Both machines are quite significant for different reasons and both represent the ultimate in motorcycling: racing at its highest level.”
Also in the catalog for the sale are the Silverman Museum Racing Collection of Ducatis and the Pierce Family Museum Collection of Harley-Davidsons.
When Dana Mecum staged his first classic car auction in Florida, it was held in conjunction with the annual Florida Corvette show at Cyprus Gardens.
“We started out with 40 cars in the parking lot behind the laundry at the Hilton Hotel,” said Mecum, whose Mecum Auctions returns to Florida in January, 2014 for an auction that will offer a quite few more than 40 cars.
“The auction doubled in size every year,” Mecum said, explaining that it wasn’t long before the original venue could provide no more than 250 places to park the auction cars.
“But we had consigned 400 cars so we had to move,” Mecum said.
Mecum moved from Cyprus Gardens to Osceola Heritage Park in Kissimmee, a community known for hosting lots of visitors (Osceola Heritage Park is a 12-mile drive from Disney World).
Again, consignments doubled each year. Well, until the last couple of years, when the growth slowed, though for good reason. After all, there are only so many classic cars available for sale at any given time, and last year Mecum’s Kissimmee event offered up bidding on 2,500 of them.
Cars, cars and more cars.
“But 3,000 is our goal,” said Mecum, adding that consignments for the 2014 auction are running ahead of the pace they arrived for the 2013 event.
“That would be something to brag about,” he said of reaching his goal of 3,000 cars at a single auction.” That would be something our company can do and no other company has the infrastructure to put together and handle that many cars.”
To put the scope of Mecum’s Kissimmee event in perspective, that one auction offers about the same number of cars as all six sales taking place during the Arizona Auction Week.
“The whole industry has settled around Arizona,” Mecum said. “We sat down one day and said, ‘there’s a lot of cars east of the Mississippi, too’.”
Now, he added, Kissimmee “has become our flagship.”
But it’s not only the number of cars available at the Kissimmee auction that has doubled and then doubled again and again. Mecum recently signed a three-year contract with NBC and its Sports Group of channels to televise many of his company’s auctions, starting with Kissimmee.
“For more than 20 years, we lived with our main media partner being Hemmings, and it still is our primary print partner,” Mecum said. “But it has 250,000 subscriptions.
“We went from that to Discovery/Velocity [TV outlets]. When we started, there were 15-18 million households [with those channels available]. It has grown to be in the 35-40 million range.
“But now we’re moving to NBC Sports and moving from 35-40 million to 80-90 million. We’re doubling our exposure. It’s a very big deal.”
Mecum also is expanding his company’s exposure by adding new events. The inaugural sale at Harrisburg, Pa., will be July 24-26 and plans are being made for another new sale, this one in Seattle.
‘The Real McCoy’ 1956 Chevrolet Corvette racer
But first come the MidAmerica motorcycle sale Jan. 9-11 in Las Vegas (Mecum is buying the long-time motorcycle auction house from its founder) and the Kissimmee sale that runs from Jan. 17-26.
With nearly 3,000 cars available at Kissimmee, there figures to be something for everyone. Mecum grades cars from general to featured to stars to “main attraction.”
This year the big attractions at Kissimmee include a couple of Duesenbergs, a couple of L88 Corvettes, a Boss 429 Mustang and the auction superstar, “The “Real McCoy” Corvette.
Mecum says his Florida auction “started as a Corvette auction and our roots are very much Corvettes. Last year we had 700 Corvettes at Kissimmee.”
The Real McCoy car is a 1956 Chevrolet Corvette SR prototype that some will tell you is the car that kept the Corvette in production. Ford launched its two-seater, the Thunderbird, for 1955 and sold 16,000 of them while Chevy found buyers for only some 700 of its fiberglass-bodied roadsters.
Chevrolet engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov knew his pet project was in jeopardy, so he stuffed a special V8 engine under the hood and headed off to Daytona Beach, where, on the eve of General Motors’ big Motorama show in New York City, he set a two-way, flying-mile speed record. Duntov then worked with three-time Indy 500 winner Maury Rose and legendary mechanic Smokey Yunick to prep the car for the Sebring endurance race, in which John Fitch and Walt Hansgen drove to ninth overall and first in their production sports car class.
Chevrolet touted the car as “The Real McCoy” in an advertising campaign.
“The Real McCoy,” said Mecum. “This is the car that saved the brand.”
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