Once upon a time, radiators that provided coolant to a car’s engine sat proudly out front in the open air. Often, that radiator was topped not merely by a cap, but by a decorative piece that included a temperature indicator to warn the driver of approaching the boiling point.
Along came engineers with wind-cheating aerodynamics and designers who added style to the automotive equation and instead of exposed parts cars had sleek bodywork that enclosed the radiator behind a sometimes decorative grille and beneath a hood.
But how would the driver know the temperature of the coolant? Now there was a gauge on the vehicle’s dashboard.
And what of the ornate radiator cap? Well, that space now could be used for any sort of decorative ornament, usually designed by the car company to portray its mascot, but sometimes car owners would find, commission or create their own hood ornaments.
For your nostalgic viewing pleasure, these are some of the hood ornaments we’ve seen as we’ve visited classic car shows and auctions in the past few months.
As if it wasn’t enough to do nearly $63 million in business in little more than two hours, it turns out there was a bonus dividend for RM Auctions in the aftermath of its Art of the Automobile auction in conjunction with Sotheby’s in November in New York City.
“It used to be harder to sell the client on ‘let me sell your car at Arizona or Amelia Island’,” said Ian Kelleher, a veteran car specialist at RM.
It seems most everyone wanted their cars included in RM’s big summer auction at Pebble Beach. But then along came the new New York auction, which drew a lot of attention — from consignors, from the media, and from people, especially younger people, who previously may not have considered classic cars as art to be purchased and even cherished.
And because the New York auction was taking place in a limited space, there was room for only 31 vehicles. However, RM could offer those that didn’t fit in Manhattan a slot at upcoming auctions in Arizona and Florida.
Kelleher also said the New York auction introduced young art collectors to the joy of classic cars.
“It’s become something people want to get involved in, even if it is just for one of two cars,” he said, adding that such newcomers “see something and love it and that’s what they want.
“They want to be able to enjoy their car,” he added, explaining that such newcomers are very good news, especially for people selling cars for less than a quarter of a million dollars.
“They see a Porsche GS GT Speedster and the see a standard-engine 1600,” Kelleher said. “To them, it doesn’t really matter if they have the four-cam variant as it does to have the same style. People are buying style and design. This is a very visual world and a very visual hobby.”
Such cars, he added, “represent accessibility to a world that is difficult to jump right in. People are driven to things that will allow them inclusion in collector car respectability” without having to spend seven figures until they have enough experience that their tastes mature and they realize the importance of that four-cam car.
1930 Duesenberg ‘Disappearing Top’ photo by Dari Schnabel | Courtesy RM Auctions
RM returns to a two-day format — Thursday the 16th and Friday the 17th — for its Arizona auction, which again will be held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort in Phoenix.
The Arizona auction begins a new year for RM, which enjoyed a phenomenal 2013 during which the RM group, which includes RM Auctions, RM Restoration and Auctions America, did $442 million in sales and had a car emerge from its restoration shop to win best-in-show at Pebble B each for an unprecedented fifth time. Total sales marked a 20-percent boost over 2012 figures.
To start 2014, the catalog for RM’s 15th Arizona auction includes more than 120 vehicles. Among them:
a 1958 Ferrari 250 GT LWB California Spider (one of 50 built);
a 1930 Duesenberg Model J “Disappearing Top” convertible coupe known as Melvin’s Murphy in honor of Walter P. Murphy Coachbuilders, the Pasadena company that created the bodywork, and Melvin Clemans, who owned the car for more than 50 years;
a 1929 Bentley 4 1/2-liter tourer;
the 1953 Siata 208S Spyder known as the Siata-Ford;
the 1935 Hispano-Suiza J12 Cabriolet de Ville with bodywork by the Rippon brothers;
a 1956 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL gullwing coupe;
a 1964 Ferrari 250 GT/L Lusso;
the 1937 Bugatti Type 57C Ventoux that won Elegance in Motion honors at Pebble Beach in 1998;
one of two 1961 Chaparral 1 race cars, this one formerly owned by Skip Barber
Kelleher said the catalog also includes a variety of “entry-level collector cars people can get in and drive and enjoy very easily.”
1961 Chaparral 1 photo courtesy RM Auctions
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When we report to you about classic car auctions, we tend to focus on the highest dollar sales figures: Which auction house sold the most expensive car in Monterey? Which auction house took in the most money in Arizona?
Dana Mecum thinks we’re looking at the wrong scoreboard.
Mecum points out that when the OEMs — the original equipment auto makers who produce the cars that might someday become classics — when the auto manufacturers tally up their monthly and annual scorecards, “No. 1 is whomever produced and sold the most cars.”
That’s the most as in volume, not as in the most expensive.
Of course, Mecum likes keeping score by volume rather than by dollars because Mecum Auctions is the classic car volume leader.
“CNN reported that 19,000 cars were offered at classic car auctions in 2013,” Mecum said. “Well, we offered 12,000 of them. That’s 65 percent of the market.”
Mecum added that he’s not claiming that big a slice of the marketplace. Instead, he said, “I think their number was low. I think it’s more like 24,000 or 25,000 vehicles.”
But that still leaves Mecum controlling half of the classic car auction market, at least in terms of total vehicles.
Mecum said his perspective is based in part because of his personal experience. “My father has been selling cars for more than 60 years,” he said. “In the 1960s, he was the largest wholesale fleet dealer in the world. I’ve always been around large groups of cars. Five-hundred cars. Two-thousand cars.”
While the auto makers continued to focus on volume, “years ago, people in the collector car industry started counting success by dollar volume,” Mecum said. “I disagreed.”
While Mecum agrees that dollars are one way to keep score, they are not the only way. Nonetheless, he’s willing to play that game.
“If you take what I call the major auction companies and go to the dollar volume,” Mecum said, “there are four that sell more than $25 million a year: Us, Barrett-Jackson, RM and Gooding.
“If you take those four and the number of cars sold, we’re at 70 percent [of the market]. If you take the dollar volume, we’re [still] at about 35 percent.”
Mecum chuckles at those who try to make the classic car marketplace more complicated than it is.
“It’s such a basically simple industry,” he said. “It runs on middle-school economics: Supply and demand.”
Sounds to me as if Mecum definitely is into the supply side of the economic equation. What do you think?
This is my first classic and at age 62 I feel like a boy with a new toy.
My truck is a 1949 Chevy, a 3100 equipped with a 350 V8 engine and automatic transmission. It has a great looking bed and paint job — a nice charcoal grey that gets a lot of attention.
It’s not what I would call a show-quality truck, but as a daily driver she is very nice and will make me proud to display at our local car shows.
Why did I wait so long to buy my truck? Well, I retired and my wife and I moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina, and bought a second home there. Hendersonville has an active classic car club. I went to one of its shows and though it looked like a lot of fun. I needed a hobby and wanted to meet new people in the area.
I started looking on the internet for classic cars and found this truck at a dealer in Atlanta. At first I was looking at cars, but then my wife told me that it was a dream of hers to own a vintage truck. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and her grandfather and father both owned old trucks and I think she just fell in love with the idea of someday owning one herself.
My plan is to trade for a different classic every two years. Maybe next time I’ll switch to a classic car.
(Rick DeBruhl managed to turn the wasted hours reading car magazines and hanging out in auto shop into a career. He works for ABC and ESPN covering IndyCars and NASCAR Nationwide. He also is part of the Fox Sports team covering the Barrett-Jackson auctions. Rick writes automotive reviews for the Arizona Republic and kidneycars.org. You can read more of his work at www.rickdebruhl.com, where this article first appeared.)
I didn’t mean to buy a BMW Isetta.
After all, I like cars for two main reasons: speed and beauty. The Isetta has neither of those two things.
It has no speed because the Isetta has a one cylinder engine that pumps out a whopping 13 horsepower. On a good day, with a tail wind, you might hit 50 mph.
It has no beauty because, well, it’s doesn’t. Oh sure, I’ll hear the word “cute” a lot. “Funny looking” will be close behind. As I climb in the single door that is the front of the bubble-shaped body, the words “odd” and “downright ugly” will be uttered after I hopefully can’t hear.
So why did I buy an Isetta? Because I had to.
It all started at Canoga Park High School back in the early 1970s. Our principal, Hugh Hodgens owned an Isetta. He’d bring it to football games on Friday nights. Every time our team would score a touchdown, he’d pop a cheerleader out the sunroof and drive around the track.
Ever since then I’ve had a fascination for the tiny cars. I remember regularly seeing one parked close to Highway 101 near Anderson’s Pea Soup in Buellton, California (just north of Santa Barbara). As I’d drive back and forth to college I’d ponder how it would be fun to own an Isetta.
Fortunately, it was not an obsession. My automotive tastes are a lot more mainstream. Mustangs and Corvettes are more my style. The smallest car I owned was a 1959 Bugeye Sprite. But while it was small, it was sporty and a lot of fun.
Over the past five years I’ve seen the Isettas become a popular fixture at the Barrett- Jackson auctions. There’s always one or two and they bring impressive money. Apparently cute sells.
Of course, not even that was enough to make me want to buy one.
Until I found it. “It” was a 1958 Isetta sitting just outside of Sacramento. It was restored about six years ago and has less than 100 miles on the odometer since the work was done. Nicely finished with red paint and a red and white interior, the frame was in great shape and the engine started right up.
But that’s not what made this Isetta special. It was special because of its owner: Hugh Hodgens. That’s right, the principal. It was the same car I’d seen him drive around the track at football games.
The path to my purchase started one day when an email was forwarded to me from a family friend who used to work at the high school. I happened to notice that Mr. Hodgen’s (I can’t call him anything else) email was included. Having plenty of happy high school memories (after all, that’s where I met my wife), I decided to send him a message, and mentioned that I had a fondness for Isettas. His return message included the nugget that he still owned the car. My next email concluded with one of those brash statements, “If you ever decide to sell the Isetta, let me know.”
Turns out that Mr. Hodgens, after owning the car for 46 years, was ready to sell. It was always a novelty, but also a part of his family. Still, it had reached the point that he wasn’t using the Isetta much. It was garaged at some property he owned near Sacramento. My offer came at just the right moment. More importantly, it wasn’t from a stranger. It was from a member of the Canoga Park High School family.
Suffice to say that one thing led to another and before long we had a deal. Mr. Hodgen’s son brought the car down to Los Angeles where I picked it up and trailered it back to Phoenix.
So now I own an Isetta.
What am I going to do with it? Well, it’s hardly transportation, at least not the way we think of it today. Back in the 50s, it was designed to be a step up from a motor scooter, if not quite a full car. It’s surprisingly comfortable and roomy, but it’s also a rolling death trap. I pity anyone who was hit in one of these back in its day. And then there’s the speed, or lack of it.
My wife and I will putter around the neighborhood. We’ll take it to church, although I’m a little worried about driving it to the grocery store. I’m not concerned about someone trying to steal it (first they’d have to figure out the backward shift pattern), rather some pranksters might try to pick it up and move it for fun (just like kids did back in its high school days). We’ll definitely hit some car shows where we stand a great chance of winning the “People’s Choice” award.
One thing we will do is make people smile. The few times I’ve driven it, people stop and point. They wave and tell their kids to come take a look. They desperately try to whip out their camera phone and take a picture.
Maybe that will be the legacy of this car. It made me smile in high school, and now I get to pass those smiles on to a new generation. How many cars can make that claim?
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & … ” Oops, of course we mean Barrett & Jackson, not Barnum & Bailey. But while one is “The Greatest Show on Earth” and the other merely stages “The World’s Greatest Collector Car Auctions,” both provide multi-ring, circus-style entertainment for children — and car collectors — of all ages.
Sure, next month Barrett-Jackson moves its auction block from a big old tent-style structure into a dazzling new 130,000-square-foot arena that was part of a $52 million upgrade to the WestWorld facilities by the City of Scottsdale, Arizona. Fear not, however, the circus continues. This year, the 43rd for Barrett-Jackson, there even will be a carousel, which you’ll be able to ride — provided, of course, that you are the high bidder — and there also will be bull-riding cowboys providing late-night entertainment over in the newly completed Equidome.
You’ll notice the changes as soon as you arrive at WestWorld, where the activities begin Sunday, January 12, with the annual Family Value Day from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.
Monday, Bret Michaels will provide the entertainment at the auction gala. Bidding on some 1,400 vehicles begins at 2 p.m. Tuesday and runs to the late afternoon on Sunday. Over the course of the week, some 250,000 people are expected to attend the circus — err, auction.
Instead of the old and relatively narrow entry way, you’ll be greeted by a set of structures that stretch eight-tenths of a mile.
“We’re in the new building but we still have the old tent,” said Barrett-Jackson chairman Craig Jackson, who said there will be structures stretching from the old building to the new one, and from there some 600 feet out into what used to be a parking lot.
“That’s eight-tenths of a mile all indoors,” he said.
Because of the new buildings, the ride-and-drive area has been moved from the upper lot to the lower pavement.
Jackson also said that the “portapotties are gone,” with the exception of a few down on the lower field. The new buildings include real restrooms.
Also gone, he said, are all those noisy electrical generators, except for the few that provide backup power for the equipment used to televise the auction.
And even the television package has changed. Gone (at least in the United States) is the Speed Channel. Instead, the Scottsdale auction will be televised by various other Fox channels, including Fox Business, the National Geographic Channel and even the primary and over-the-air Fox broadcast channel that shows everything from NFL games to American Idol.
Speaking of American idols, some of the most iconic American cars will be featured during Fox Broadcast’s live coverage on Saturday.
Barrett-Jackson’s star cars, the Salon Collection, will be split into two groups with American cars up for bidding during the Fox Broadcast in the afternoon and European classics and sports cars during the usual prime-time Saturday night extravaganza, which will be televised by National Geographic.
“We’ve supersized Saturday,” Jackson said.
Photos courtesy Barrett-Jackson
The Salon Collection gets its own 216-page catalog. That’s in addition to the 600-plus page catalog that covers the rest of the auction docket.
Those Salon cars range from a 1929 Duesenberg to a gull-wing Mercedes-Benz 300SL and from a Shelby King Cobra to the Snake and Mongoose Hot Wheels funny cars and their transporters.
“We’ve had an incredible journey this past year with the Snake and Mongoose,” Jackson said. “The first premiere of the movie was at Hot August Nights [where Barrett-Jackson staged its newest auction during the popular and annual hot-rod festival].
“Then we took both cars and car haulers and drove them down the drag strip at Indy where all the [famed] grudge matches started in the U.S. Nationals. There was another movie premiere night at Indianapolis and all the modern and legendary drag racers came. That was truly incredible.
“Snake [Don Prudhomme] and Mongoose [Tom McEwen] changed drag racing by bringing non-automotive sponsorship — and showmanship — into it.
“I don’t know what the cars and transporters will bring,” Jackson added. “I put them into the wild-card category, but they’re truly a piece of American history.”
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1931 Duesenberg Model J Tourster Derham was best in show (domestic) at 2013 Concours of America.
The Concours d’Elegance of America at St. John’s has named longtime concours leader Larry Moss as chairman of the board and event chairman for 2014.
Moss served as event chairman of the Meadow Brook Concours in 1999 and 2000, as chairman of the car selection committee from 2007 to 2010 and as board member from 2008 to 2010. After the event was moved to The Inn at St. John’s in 2011, Moss remained active on the judge’s committee and car selection committee. Moss replaces Peter Heydon, who recently resigned after serving as chairman of the board since 2009.
The 36th annual Concours d’Elegance of America takes place Sunday, July 27, 2014, at The Inn of St. John’s in Plymouth, Michigan. For more information, see www.concoursusa.org.
1966 Ford GT40 on display at the museum’s recent People’s Choice Demo Day. Photo courtesy Simeone Museum
The Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum presents a celebration of the Ford GT40, the groundbreaking race car that famously beat Ferrari at Le Mans, in a special Racing Legends event at noon on January 11, 2014, at the Philadelphia-based museum.
Well-known GT40 expert Greg Kolasa will lead a discussion on the development and history of the GT40. Kolasa, who wrote The Definitive Shelby Mustang Guide 1965-1970, is Shelby American Automobile Club historian and registrar.
The GT40, so named because of its roof height in inches, holds a special place in the history of American auto racing. After Enzo Ferrari had imperiously snubbed Ford’s efforts to acquire his automobile business, Ford set out to beat Ferrari at its most-hallowed racing venue, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Led by Carroll Shelby, who had already trounced Ferrari with the Cobra Daytona coupe for a GT class win in 1965, the GT40 team completely dominated the 1966 running of Le Mans with an outright win that saw them cross the finish line in first, second and third places. The GT40s were back the following year, and again won Le Mans for 1967.
GT40s were raced by privateers for years after, and today the GT40 remains one of the most hotly sought-after collector cars for vintage racing.
Both of the Simeone Museum’s GT40s, a Mk. II and a Mk. IV, will be displayed during the January 11 program and, weather permitting, they will be taken out for demonstration runs after the presentation.
Now that he’s put away the sleigh and fed the reindeer, Santa’s swapping his tall back snow boots for his favorite pair of Pilotis and he’s heading out on the road in his classic sports car for a nice long drive. What classic car activity are you doing this holiday season? (Tell us about it in the “Share your thoughts!” box below.)
Regardless your ride — be it a classic or brand new — from the Jolly One, and from all of us at the ClassicCars.Com Blog, have a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year.
Dana Mecum has tried more than once to become a significant player in the sales of classic motorcycles. For example, twice in the last three years his Monterey auction has included collections of 70 or more motorcycles.
That was then. This is now: Mecum is buying MidAmerica Auctions, a motorcycle specialist with some 30 years in business. Mecum begins making his mark by presenting Mid-America’s 23rd annual Las Vegas motorcycle auction January 9-11 at the South Point Hotel.
In addition to motorcycle sales, the program includes Gene Romero’s West Coast flat-track motorcycle races.
Las Vegas becomes Motorcycle Central that week in January with Bonhams staging a one-day sale at Bally’s Las Vegas.
“Ron Christenson, the founder [of MidAmerica], has done this for 30 years,” Mecum said. “He is staying onboard as president. He knows the motorcycles and everybody who has them.
“Our success allows us to use our marketing to put his company on the next level.,” Mecum added. “Ron and I have worked together and he realizes this will help secure the company’s future.”
After trying to work motorcycles into his company’s classic car auctions, Mecum said he learned that “the core motorcycle guys want their own event.”
In 2013, MidAmerica’s Las Vegas event resulted in more than 400 sales for nearly $6 million.
With that in mind, but also mindful of the potential for cross-pollination, MidAmerica will stage a one-day classic motorcycle auction April 13 in Houston.
“We’re there for a car auction Thursday, Friday and Saturday [April 10-12],” Mecum said. “The motorcycle auction will be on Sunday. Car people who want to stay for the motorcycles can, and motorcycle people can come a day early if they want to take a look at the cars.”
Mecum knows that many car owners are adding a motorcycle or two to their collections.
“You can put one in your office, or in the lobby of your business, or even in your living room,” he said.
“Cars are moving into being looked at as pieces of art and the motorcycle is totally exposed. You look at it and you see its heart.”
The MidAmerica/Mecum sale at Las Vegas will offer more than 600 vintage motorcycles, including 20 from the George Pardos Collection representing “the evolution of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle,” dating from a 1911 7D Twin to a 1965 FL model (see photos).
Special guests at an auction dinner Thursday evening are Jean Davidson, granddaughter of one of the Harley-Davidson founders, and her son, Jon. Jean Davidson began riding at age 12, at one time owned the largest Harley-Davidson dealership in Wisconsin and is the author of several books.
