Monterey Car Week is a pretty incredible event, full of incredible cars and fancy clothes and fish eggs smeared on crackers and beautiful surroundings that my presence only devalues. Significantly. It’s also a place where a remarkable concentration of huge car auctions take place in a short span of time, and I don’t think I’ve fully appreciated just how much of a spectator sport those auctions are.
I’m not kidding; it’s genuinely fun to go to these auctions and make a game of it, trying to guess what the cars will eventually sell for, watching the crowd and trying to figure out who’s likely to bid or who isn’t, enjoying the drama of bidding wars that erupt for some of the lots – there’s a lot more going on there than you might think.
It’s a game of trying to understand the overall car market, which is in itself a complex minestrone of factors: what’s the economy like, what cars are currently desirable and why; what factors in other parts of the culture are affecting what people find desirable? Are there subtle trends happening? And if so, what are they, and how do they affect what’s being sold? It’s strangely compelling.
Going with the whole Co-founder Crew is fun, because David is a cheap bastard who pays for Arby’s sandwiches on installments, and I’m no better at all, plus I have the tastes of a Soviet-era grandma with a hoarding problem. Beau is the only one with any sense, and he gets into all the auctions. He’s the MVP here, and if you watch this video of us at this supercar auction, I think you’ll see why:
As you can see in that video, we like to play a Price Is Right type of game at these auctions, where we look at the cars beforehand, scrutinize and evaluate and process and, yes, guess, all to try and come up with our best prediction of the final selling price. Then we go to the auction, and see who was right and who was wrong.
In this case, we were focused on this incredible array of ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s supercars, exotic and strange wedge-shaped things, from companies like Mercedes-Benz, Cizeta, Bugatti, and, yes, Vector.
This video has a bit of a surprise ending, because Beau actually won the auction for the Vector M12, number five of only 14, the only purple one, powered by a Lamborghini seven-liter V12 engine. It’s a fantastic, ridiculous car, and we’ll have more about this thing soon.
Here’s the takeaway: car auctions can be a blast. And they can be even better if you show up with someone who actually buys one of these crazy things.
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