I showed you some enticing ads from the January 1966 Road and Track. But the February issue has that beat hands down. There’s two 1964 Ferrari GTO’s for sale. The second one is cheaper, and has genuine racing provenance, having come in “First overall Daytona ’64”. That asking price of $9500 adjusts to $77k in 2021 dollars.
If one had bought this, given the recent price of $70 million for a GTO in 2018, the most expensive car ever sold, that amounts to a 7,368% increase. Not a bad investment, eh?
Here’s the $70 million ’63 GTO, which won the 1964 famed Tour de France race and came in fourth at Le Mans.
Oh hindsight. Here’s my dream car:
If it is not an omission, the absence of a zip code would date this ad from 1963 or earlier. $6500 was a chunk of change back then.
Possibly on the date, hard to say. It’s one of only 24 alloy 300SLs made and one sold in 2015 for 4.62 million.
I wasn’t alive back in 1966, so I can’t speak with any authority as to what people were actually doing in practice at that time, but Zip Codes didn’t become mandatory until 1967, even though they were introduced in 1963.
That is well over double the return one would have had from investing in the Dow Jones, inflation adjusted, over the same time period. Not taking into account the expense of maintaining and storing the Ferrari.
Here’s the flip-side to the GTO ad: a few days ago, I spotted what, from a distance, looked like a decent 1969 Road Runner coupe for sale. Upon closer inspection, besides being nothing special (a strippo 383 Torqueflite combo), the wavy quarter panels looked to be filled with fiberglass and a paint job that, up close, looked like it had been applied with a paintbrush.
It was in front of some sort of detailing warehouse and when I spoke to the guy, I got some story that sounded a lot like BS, i.e., some old widow’s dead husband’s car that he’d fixed up and had been in storage for at least 10 years after he died and she wanted it operational to take her husband’s urn for ‘one last ride’ on some anniversary. When I pointed out all the fiberglass in the bodywork, the guy actually had the nerve to tell me “all metal has some fiberglass in it”(!).
But what really got my goat was that he’d appraised this steaming pile at $29k! He claimed the widow thought it was worth $19k. $19k to $29k for a ratty old Road Runner that needed lots of proper bodywork? I have no doubt new quarter panels would have only been the start. The guy admitted to it needing brake work (typical standard drums), too, and god-knows what else it needed mechanically.
In 2003 in Toronto I saw a straight-looking(-from-a-distance) early Baccaruda in the showroom of a place called Gentry Lane, who specialised in classic, antique, exotic, and special-interest cars. They had the Lotus franchise for the area. The ’65 Baccaruda was a 15-footer; get closer than that and start countin’ up the problems. It had a not-very-clean ’70s 318 indifferently tossed into the engine bay, which was painted black (wrong!) on this light turquoise car. The interior had comparable problems. The wheels were wrong. The car was basically straight, but in no way original.
As I was walking around it, the salesman with his practiced-but-phony English accent came up and started talking up the car: “It’s a fine original example of its type, and we’ve got it on offer at $18,000”.
I said “Eighteen grand, eh? Despite the non-original engine and the missing fender tag?”
Salesman chuckled indulgently and said “Well, you must understand, back then no records were kept, and the factory did so many different things with engines and such, it’s just not possible to say what’s original and what isn’t. As to the fender tag, some cars never had them”.
Rrrrright, so I guess the factory had a time machine in 1965 that let them dash forward and grab a 318 with a full complement of 1977 emission control devices and stuff. Sure, Jan.
A few weeks later the car was gone, so someone with more money than
brains probably bought it. That sale went into the “data” behind NADA’s numbers.
Unless I am severely misinformed (which is entirely possible), stupid crap like this is why NADA “book value” is largely fictional, at least as regards old cars. There aren’t many ’65 Baccarudas in existence any more, which means even fewer of them are being bought and sold, of which only a certain subset are being bought and sold through NADA-member dealerships, which means the NADA books are based on very few, selected data points, many of which are skewed by the nature of the specific cars being sold. Some of those cars sell for silly high prices, and then the NADA print up their little comic book stating the “value” of a 1965 Baccaruda (or whatever car).
Then there are also the auto auctions, which are lousy with corruption and cheating and other chicanery.
For a non car reference, the first Alibaba investor had a return of 20,000% Not as much fun as a GTO, but a lot cheaper to own.
According to Hagerty’s valuation tool, this 1964 Series 2 GTO would only be worth forty-nine million dollars in concours condition. The more common Series 1 GTOs are the ones that bring the big money.
Practically a parts car. More like a Ferrari Tempest Custom.
If we only knew…..I would have mortgaged my house to the hilt and bought a few of them!
AND you could have written off the interest as a tax deduction, increasing your return!
Now if there was just a way to declare a car as a second home…
One common theme that ran through all of the restoration articles or TV shows I’ve seen on Ferrari’s was gallons of plastic filler.
Maybe, the original owners didn’t want to turn in an insurance claim or figured it would just get wrecked again, so proper repairs didn’t matter.
But seeing an exotic car that someone, years later, that had spent hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars on and then being handed shoeboxes full of plastic filler dust was mind blowing.
If this is how a Ferrari is repaired, with over an inch or filler, what chance does the regular car have?
Right now on Bay Area CL there’s a 2005 Aston Martin DB5 with 18,000 miles offered for 42,000 dollars. This is a somewhat comparable buying opportunity, and interest rates have never been lower. If you really want an exotic car then here’s your chance. It’s the same with late model Porsches, and other semi exotics. They are not cheap, but they are attainable to a middle class guy that really wants one. Maintenance and upkeep, well that’s another subject. That 42 grand is actually less than a new Mustang GT convertible would set me back. I know that I would never drive my Aston as much as I would my Mustang, so it becomes kind of an expensive toy. I can’t easily sell my Wife on the idea because she knows that I’m not a “forever” kind of car guy. Even if I should get that Aston, the next day I’d be on CL looking at other cars. That 42 grand is not prohibitively expensive, but it’s more than pocket change for me. I guess that I’d rather put the money ( and much more) into the upgrading of my house.
Crazy to think that these cars are now worth 30 times the current value of the houses they were garaged in.. The latter NY one last sold for only 1.64mill.
Not surprised. Houses are infinitely available. These classic cars are certainly the opposite.
Regarding the seller of the first GTO: from Wikipedia:
Chris Cord (born July 15, 1940) is a race car driver and is a grandson of Errett Lobban Cord, the founder of the Cord Corporation which also ran Cord Automobile.
In 1987, he won the IMSA Camel GT Driver’s Championship.
The owner of the 2nd car also raced GTOs. The late Bob Grossman (who once sold me a car) drove a different GTO to 6th overall and 1st in class at Le Mans in 1962. His co-driver was none other than Nascar’s Fireball Roberts.
https://www.racingsportscars.com/driver/photo/Bob-Grossman-USA.html
Chris Cord was living the good life… so his house in West LA is worth around 5 mil nowadays, and he was selling on his Ferrari GTO. Not a bad setup for a 25 year old at the time. Fitzgerald was right… the rich are different from you and me.
Those Ferrari prices are off the wall. I’d really be interested to find out who’s blowing that kind of money on one car. Obviously they’re investors and not drivers but very few people have that kind of dough to throw around on such speculation. Then you need a bunker, security etc and I doubt they even get registered from one sale to the next to avoid taxes.
The buyer/current owner of the silver ’63 Ferrari 250 GTO is billionaire David MacNeil, founder/owner/CEO of WeatherTech. He is a well known and prolific collector with the wherewithal to spend whatever it takes to buy whatever he wants. Which he clearly did with his $70MM+ GTO purchase.
Yet they still race- and rub panels at Goodwood in these cars. A field with several of these GTOs must be up there in the ‘most expensive race grid’ stakes.
They would be cheeper still by the late 60s, and would generally remain under $10k through around 1971. Wouldn’t be surprised if some hapless ex-racer traded one in at a San Bernardino Cadillac dealership at some point.