Remember the ex-James Hunt
Austin A35 Countryman
we mentioned a couple of weeks ago? It and a host of classic and modern performance and racing machinery went under the hammer at the Silverstone Classic auction last Saturday, and there were one or two eyebrow-raising results.
The Austin, which used to belong to the man who famously opined "Well of course that's bollocks" when Murray Walker suggested that Rene Arnoux's lack of pace was down to the fact that he was more used to driving turbocharged rather than atmospheric F1 cars, sold for £13,000. The ex-Sir Stirling Moss Vespa ET4, however, didn't sell against an upper estimate of £8000.
The Ferrari 456
was reportedly a little 'loose at the seams', but still looked good value with an estimate of £18,000-24,000, but the bidding got no further than £15,000 and it wasn't sold.
Two Ferraris that did sell were the Dino 246GT and the 330 P4 replica (okay, so one was a replica, and there are some who don't consider the Dino to be a 'real' Ferrari...but that's just being a wee bit picky)The Dino had been restored by Terry Hoyle and made a healthy £95,500 (estimate £90,000-110,000), whereas the replica P4 went for £51,000. That sounds like a lot for a replica, but this one had been done properly by all accounts (carb-fed Ferrari V12 and many parts from Maranello, etc...) and was arguably one of the better-value sales on the day.
There were a couple of contrasting Aston Martin DB4s too.
This one
was fully restored and sold for £170,000, whereas
the other
was in original, unrestored condition and made £100,000.
The question is, would you spend £70,000 on the unrestored car to make it mint, or would you prefer to keep it original? As the saying goes 'you can restore many times, but it's only original once...'
At every auction there are one or two cars which are sold for bids beneath the low estimate, and the Silverstone Classic was no exception. The Alfa Romeo Zagato was apparently in very good order and had a low estimate of £14,000, but found a new owner on the day for just £12,400.
The DeTomaso Pantera
, meanwhile (does anyone else reckon that the steering wheel looks just like one off a MKIII Cortina?), sold for £26,500, against a low estimate of £28,000.
You can get a full list of results on the Silverstone Auctions website, but a couple of other notable lots were a Porsche 935 replica with a supposed 580bhp which went for £34,700, and a 996 GT2 which can't have been very far off being sold at a high bid of £39,500...but didn't.
I wonder how much higher than £15,000 you'd have had to have gone to get the 456...
Ps - All told, the auction drew almost £1,500,000 on the hammer (all prices by the way are exclusive of 10% of the hammer price, plus VAT on the 10%), and around 65% of the lots were sold.
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