Classic Cars

It might seem like a distant microcosm of the classic car world, but the sheer number and value of classics going under the hammer on California’s Monterey Peninsula during the Pebble Beach Concours-centred ‘car week’ each year means its ripples can’t help but reach far-away shores. We’re talking 600-plus cars, taking more than £270m between them. The grand totals, including sell-through rates, were little different from last year but beneath the headline numbers lie all sorts of nuances – from the cautious buying at the top collector end of the spectrum to the shifting appetite away from curves and chrome-era cars towards more youthful metal. It’s a mass injection of raw data that requires expert eyes to make sense of, the first step of which is to put it all…

Ben Grey’s bucket list of cars he’d love to drive is littered – as so many are – with the sort of exotic metal that few are ever fortunate to own in a lifetime. So why did this 24-year-old chemical plant process operator include something as humble as an MGB GT, and one surely too old to have any cultural resonance for him? Affordablility, perhaps? Well, he only goes and blows our thinking out of the water by arriving at our meeting point – the driveway of MG Car Club member Tony Wood’s home in a picturesque North Yorkshire village – in the full snap, crackle and thunderclap that is a 2010 Aston Martin DBS. ‘I wasn’t sure if this would be an issue,’ he says, pointing at the Aston…

For a Jensen Interceptor, £56,500 really is a good bid. Decent examples usually make between £35,000 and £45,000, but the Dore & Rees 1974 Interceptor MkIII, sold in its June sale, was something special. This car has had two owners who between them covered just 16,500 miles over 50 years. The first was a Dr Mok based at a Mayfair address – it still wears his private plate 10 MOK – who sold it back to the supplying Jensen dealer which kept it in the family ever since. It had never been offered for public sale before. An absolute stunner in Cerise with tan hide, and with the bigger J-series 7.2 Chrysler V8, this Jensen ticked every box and then some. Never driven in the rain and always garaged, there…

Capri 2.8i or MGB GT? Having spent two years and too much money restoring a 1974 MGB GT, I realise I should have bought a Ford Capri 2.8 Injection in the first place. The ’B is a charming old thing and everyone seems to admire it, but it’s just not as exciting to drive as the 2.8i I had back in the Nineties, when they were so cheap. I’ve held back from buying one because they’ve become quite expensive. Should I swallow the £15-20k you seem to pay for a mint one in case all the publicity around the new Capri (SUV!) drives interest and prices ever higher? Peter Dennison I don’t think Ford’s new electric Capri will raise prices of the originals – not in the long term anyway.…

Though classic Porsche prices have been one of the few certainties in recent years, cars with a genuine claim to rarity still have the power to add value. Various results from Monterey Week illustrated this, not least from Broad Arrow’s sale on 14-15 August. It achieved $7.045m (£5.34m) for a 1997 Porsche GT1 Rennversion, while Gooding took $4.295m (£3.26m) for the first 935 built, which was below the estimate but looked healthy. Low-production road models were flying too. Broad Arrow knocked down a 2015 918 Spyder for $2.48m (£1.88m), Bonham’s sold another 2015 example around its $2.6m (£1.97m) low estimate and Gooding took $1.655m (£1.25m) for another. RUF’s specials have never been more desired, as shown by Broad Arrow’s sales of a 1998 Turbo R Limited for $1.71m (£1.3m) and…

This is Mercedes W196R, chassis number 9, built in late 1954 for the 1955 Formula 1 season. For the last 59 years it’s been in the museum at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but news broke in late summer of the car’s forthcoming sale on the open market. This will be handled by RM Sotheby’s and is likely to take place near the end of the year at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. The car was displayed at Pebble Beach in August, ahead of a trip home to Germany for a detailed inspection and report from Mercedes-Benz Classic. An estimate of $50m-$70m (currently £38.2m-£53.5m) has appeared in some reports, but in Mercedes-Benz’s own press release, comparisons are made with the 300SLR ‘Uhlenhaut Coupé’, the gullwing-doored relative of the W196 that changed…