No.
That was easy. Next…
Okay, okay. Worn out, mentally and physically broken, tired mechanic writing here. But I’ll do my best to expand.
In my childhood, my ol’ man bought a series 1 E Type, 4.2 roadster in what should have been pristine condition for ten grand. He put it through the workshop, sorting through the mechanical, electrical and cosmetic imperfections. Sold it for about twenty five thousand pounds.
And made a loss, of something like eight or nine thousand. The interim work took nearly a thousand hours, parts, trim, paint and materials. The car, like so many others, was hiding a good deal of rot and crash damage behind the suspiciously shiny coat of paint that could not possibly have been identified at purchase.
An expensive roll of the dice then for him, but the next owner within about fifteen years had an immaculate example worth about a hundred grand.
A profit of £75k, and all with the fun of owning the most beautiful car ever made?
Well, he should have done a little better than my poor old man did, but all is not as it seems.
Classic cars suffer the same accounting trick as horses. In the intoxicating auction room (literally in lots of cases, you’ll be plied with all the champagne you can consume to loosen up your bidding arm), everybody forgets about the bit in between purchase and sale. And that looks something like this…
- Storage. You wouldn’t leave £5k, £50k or £100k in cash in a heap on your driveway open to theft, the weather and carelessness, so don’t be thinking that’s good enough for your car. The thing is, if you cover it, it deteriorates where you can see it. If you don’t cover it, it deteriorates out of sight. You’re going to need a garage, or professional storage that on average, is going to cost you £50 a week.
- Maintenance. Cars move, and wear up. Cars sit still, and seize up. Assuming all things being equal, you’re going to have to budget £2500 per car, annually, for servicing and maintenance. You might think you’ll be lucky and get away with it, but with a fragile, underdeveloped classic made from perishable materials, I promise you, there will always be ‘something’. Fuel systems particularly suffer with the higher concentration of ethanol we have to cope with these days.
- Repairs. The E Type hiding an inch of filler (bondo, for any American readers) manifested itself by microblisters forming in the paint, the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Classics have a nasty way of concealing suprises like this, and it’s almost impossible to foresee. These things have, by definition, had a life of at least twenty five years – in the case of modern classics, that’s about twenty years beyond design life. So expect the unexpected.
- Restoration costs. Spiralling costs of absolutely everything has a huge knock-on effect on the cost of restoration. Long gone are the days of a ten grand rebuild – think closer to a hundred thousand for a full nut and bolt rebuild of just about any car, with costs rising rapidly for anything unusual, specialist, weird and wonderful.
If my calculations are correct, assuming maintenance and storage costs, that’s a cost of £76,500 over the fifteen year period, and a net loss of £1500. Store it in your own garage, you say? Insurance. Tax. Fuel. Pest control. ‘Storage rash’ (expensive paintwork damage caused by careless movements around the car). You aren’t that much better off.
Occasionally, you might get lucky. It’s only really the top end of the market – the playground where Arabian oil princes bid against each other with limitless budgets to secure exclusivity – that moves enough to compensate. A Ferrari F40 can be bought for around £1.5/2m now, and it will be a £5m car in my lifetime.
Should you do it? No.
I do get it though. Cars to me, are moments in time. The sound of a Sierra power steering pump straining at full lock takes me back to happy times navigating a train station car park. The smell of exhaust fumes and the sound of an off-beat V8 still makes the hairs stand up on my arms.
If, like me, you have the ‘car thing’ in your blood and under your skin, here’s some advice that might make the road to ruin less rocky.
- You can predict quite easily which cars at ‘our level’ will rise and fall. What did someone who is forty five now, want when they were twenty? That means, climbing now are hot hatches. I actually had a ropey old shed of a Mk1 Golf GTi that I bought for about £300, ran it out of test and sold on for spares. That very car would be a £5k machine now, as saggy as it was. If you want to get ahead of the curve – get hold of the kind of cars I used to play with on the PlayStation. Colin McRae Rally, Need for Speed and all that will be good for Impreza and Evo’s. I also believe in what I’ve called the ‘Top Gear’ effect. Who would have thought an original Peel P50 would be worth £120,000 now? The Renault Avantime, Toyboata-era Hilux and even the Lexus LFA (which I guarantee you wouldn’t have made any fuss about if Clarkson hadn’t liked it) are all good tips I reckon. Even my beloved L322 is ticking up in value because he called it ‘the best car ever made’, and mine isn’t even the desirable one.
- Play the market to your advantage. If you want to predict those that fall, it’s cars that belong to the generation that are ageing beyond being able to cope with them. Iconic British cars for the generation above mine are all taking a hit now – Big Healeys, Astons and Jags, that E Type that was worth about £100k seven or eight years ago has probably halved now. Bad news for current owners, good news for aspiring owners. Really good news for strange younger folks like me, with my strange affection for Riley RME’s. I’m rather hoping you’ll be able to get a good one for about £5k in a few years.
- Always buy the best you can. I’d never personally restore a car, or commission a restoration. You’re going to lose it for over a year, and the cost will be approximately the GDP of the UK. Far better, to buy the very best you can, and if you want to tailor it, then by all means do. For example – one day, I will have a Triumph TR6. They’ve softened a bit too, and they’re all £25k now – on the basis that a minter is £25k, a £20k car needs £5k investing in it, a £15k needs £10k and so on. Whatever the car, spend another couple of thousand at purchase than another ten down the line.
Appreciate them for what they are. Don’t expect your old car to behave like your daily, especially if your everyday car happens to be powered by electricity. With all the modifications in the world, you can’t undo poor build quality, old school materials and designs – you’ll only be disappointed by trying. Make sure you can cope with heavy steering, advisory brakes, the smell of unburnt fuel and more frequent maintenance required. By and large, the market respects originality too. So many owners invest huge sums of money to make ‘RS Replica’ or ‘Evocation’ cars from original examples, and slash their value as a result. I’m not really a purist, I respect everyone’s impression of what their car should be… But most don’t.
And for gods sake, drive it. It’ll thank you for it. Engines need oil circulation, brakes need using, fuel needs burning. Most of the cars I work on suffer from lack of use these days, rather than wearing out.
The cars we love are also increasingly becoming like horses, as they became in the post-war era. Once commonplace, now owned by a few well-heeled individuals. We have the investment market to thank for incredible events that celebrate cars, like Goodwood – but it’s sad, really, that thoroughbred cars that once charged past in dual carriageways making boys and men smile, now rarely see the light of day. My Dad used his Escort Cosworth every day, and it now sits beautifully restored, behind a velvet rope in a museum. Like a stuffed sabre toothed tiger.
You’d better hope I don’t win the lottery, or I’m going to buy an ultra low mileage Ferrari from a collectors auction, and leave a big, black number eleven in the exit doorway as I drive home.
