Dan's Papers - January 16, 2009 - Classic Cars

I'm sure that those of you out there who have been around classic cars for a while most likely have similar stories like mine to tell. Let me just relay some automotive tales from the dark side as well as the light side. Read them and weep, or perhaps laugh. I once traded a mint 1952 MG-TD for a rather doggy 1953 Jaguar XK-120MC coupe. I was taken in by the swoopy, sexy lines of the Jag as compared to the dowdy, square shaped little MG. Whereas the Morris Garage's ride never missed a beat, while owning the Jag-u-ar, it gave me nothing but headaches. And yet, of the two, it is still that XK-120 that I lust after to this day. Jaguar certainly built some hauntingly beautiful automobiles.

I lived in Manhattan and really had the hots for a Lotus Super Seven, which is probably the most rudimentary sports car ever made. At the time, around 1970, the best Super Seven I could find was in Aspen, Colorado. I purchased the car and flew to Aspen planning to drive it home. Bad idea. It was the middle of winter and the heater in the car was what I call a "right footer," because that was the only part of my body it would keep warm. Very British. The car also had a fabric top and side curtains whose fit was so bad that you could see the gaps from outer space. I drove the entire trip with various articles of clothing plugging the windows. One other piece of automotive fun: The Lotus stopped running on Interstate 80 in the middle of Idaho. Have you ever tried to get parts for a Lotus in Idaho? Lesson learned. If you buy a car that doesn't live in your neighborhood, ship it.

Talk about a bad time to sell. I like wooden station wagons and, during the '70s, owned three of them, all Fords. A 1947, a 1949 and a 1951. The 1949 was stolen one late afternoon from outside of Max's Kansas City, one of my favorite NY haunts. I sold the 1951 to Roy Lichtenstein for around $1,200, which was about what is was worth at the time. The 1947 was sold several years later for about the same amount. What stuns me is that, today, these woodies are worth well over $100,000 each. I sure would love to come across that one that was stolen. By law, it's still mine.

Worse time to sell. I really like old Porsche and Ferrari race cars, mainly because they represent the state of the art in automotive engineering by the manufacturers during the period in which they are built and raced. At different times I had two very rare vintage Porsche race cars. One a 1954 550 Spyder and the other, a 1967 910 Bergspyder (Mountain racer). In the late '70s, there was not a great market for a used race car. It seemed no one wanted a used up, beaten to death racing machine that was outclassed by more modern, faster designs. I sold my 550 Spyder for around $4,000 and the 910, one of only 28 ever built by the Porsche factory, for $36,000. Today, a 550 sells for around $700,000. and a 910, if you could find one, hovers around $1 million, and that's in a weak world economy.

During the same period I had the Porsches, I was offered a Ferrari GTO race car for $7,500 and a 427 factory racing Ford Cobra for $5,000. I passed on them. Like I said, no one wanted a used racing car. The Ferrari GTO and the Cobra R type are the two most valuable of their marque today. Try $3 million, each. I sold my 1965 Ferrari Lusso in 1968 for 5,000 bucks and today it's worth about $350,000, but that's chump change when compared to those race cars. Why is it hindsight usually makes one feel like a total idiot?

Weird breakdowns. Contrary to popular belief, some very famous German cars, when they first arrived in America, were quite troublesome. I had several Volkswagen Westphalia campers, which I loved for their space and practicality. This was our family truckster. The only problem was that because the vans shared the same underpowered little engine that was in the much lighter Beetle, there was a great strain on the motor. Admittedly, I drove the camper hard like it was the box a Porsche came in, and perhaps that's why I was always burning up its engine. Anyway, VW engines were cheap in the '70s, just like the VW. Speaking of weak engines, the Porsche 356 was nothing to write home about. Most well driven four cylinder Porsches would need a crankshaft by 80,000 miles. That weak crankshaft is probably the main reason the crankshaft in the newer 911 is overbuilt. In those days, Porsche engines were not cheap, just like anything to do with that expensive little car.