[s-cars] Hypothetical mods

[Eric Phillips]

I think that the vintage-Italian thing is right on.

For whatever reason, vintage Italian is more precious than gold these
days.  Vintage German?  Not so much.  Like others have pointed out,
the rare true sports cars from the Fatherland are appreciating, but if
you want to make money with a car, better to buy a Detroit muscle car
from the '60s and do something with that.  Or a pedestrian Italian car
of the same vintage.

In the early '90s, I was trying to talk my wife into letting me buy
yet another Alfa.  I had found a '72 GTV that was absolutely
beautiful, and in really great shape.  The guy wanted $2800 for it,
and I only had about $2200 in my car budget.  He wouldn't budge from
that figure, so I needed to scrape up $600.  The wife just would NOT
go for it.  "It looks like a Datsun," she says.

Last Fall, a similar car on eBay had 43 bids and the current top bid
when I looked at it was north of $25k.  I made a point of connecting
the dots for my wife, I must add.

Hell, even my 3.0-converted GTV6 would have given me a 5x ROI.  I saw
a Calloway-prepped one go a couple of years ago for over $20k.  But
those were pretty rare even then.

I fondly remember when a reasonable late-'50s Sprint Zagato could be
had for $50k or so.

Good luck not getting laughed at on that price for a basket-case SZ these days.

Eric

> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:19:01 +0700
> From: "JC" <jc at j2c3.com>
> Subject: Re: [s-cars] Hypothetical mods
> To: "'LL - NY'" <larrycleung at gmail.com>
>
>>
>> I'd even question most M-cars ever really appreciating.  The
>> M1 for sure, the old 507 and it's retro update of the early
>
> Lar -
>
> Well its started to happen a bit. I agree completely in principle w/ your
> remarks and they might not ever be in the vintage-italian type stratosphere,
> but it is true that for instance the remaining clean UrM3's are really
> starting to go up now.