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behind the barn doors — A GENTLEMAN'S PURSUIT
australian grand prix '13 - pit lane
australian grand prix '13 - classics
Tear out the other seat and it'll be worth a fortune.
behind the barn doors
Ever since the old, busted up, rusted-out 8th mini ever built was sold at auction for a staggering £40,000, many owners have quietly been thinking a bit about taking an iron bar and some sandpaper to their classics before putting them on the market.
Psychotic episodes in the garage aside, there's plenty of wind in the sails for barn-finds* and other originals in the market at the moment. Auction houses are finding more and more that any relatively intact classic can fetch surprisingly good money compared with their fully restored stablemates.
Our last post was all about why people love classics and we proffered that it has something to do with 'the mystery'. It's a pretty romantic theory, but a quick look at the hard numbers will see it stack up all the same. The patina of a car, the creases in its aged leather interior; it all tells a story. Is that why we're paying bigger and bigger dollars for original cars, for shells, for submerged, crashed, almost irreparable and rust-riddled chassis? The days of the highly-polished, eternally-garaged classic will never be done, but cars with a more obvious tale to tell are on the rise as far as dollars are concerned.
Taking patina and originality to the extreme, the Lidner-Nocker E-Type Jag really divided people in the to-restore-or-not-to-restore debate. After a 1964 crash which claimed four lives, the lightweight Jag's chassis was recently reassembled and restored, reportedly retaining 90 per cent of the original parts. One wonders if, with the current market appetite for originality, everyone could've spared some time and effort and sold it at auction as a crumpled heap.
Our pick for beautifully original, on-the-rise, still relatively affordable classics? Open as many barn doors as you can find, and cross your fingers that there's an Aston Martin DB2/4 behind one of them.
In the meantime, stop polishing your car, pop it in a field for a couple of decades and  thank us when you sell it for a fortune.
*For the uninitiated, a 'barn find' is exactly what it sounds like: a car in a state of disrepair that's been found in a barn (or the like).
Tags: outrage!, restoration, Aston Martin, Jaguar
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