A recession is a good time to buy a car, if you follow your head...and even, sometimes, your heart.
I don't know anything about shares and I always feel totally left out when the topic comes up. Yet, I sit back and have to quietly smile when I realize all I've done with cars is just buy the cars that I like on the premise that if I like them other car people will probably like them, too.
When I bought my McLaren F1, it was the most money I'd ever spent on an automobile in my life before or since. My McLaren was a '94. I purchased it in '98 and it was $800,000. It was almost the price of when it was new, just a little bit cheaper. It had 1,800 miles and I thought well this is crazy and I talked to people and I talked to my brother and I said "I know it's stupid, alright ... I'll buy it!" I've had stocks lose money, I've had everything else lose money; the only thing that's gone up in value is my Mc-Laren!
It's not just expensive cars that go up in value either. I bought a '66 Oldsmobile Toronado. We hopped up the powertrain and converted it to rear-wheel drive from front-wheel drive and made it a little over 1,000 horsepower! But from the outside, it still appeared to be totally stock.
It won the Hot Rod magazine Hot Rod of the Year and got so much publicity I was getting angry letters from people saying "I used to buy a Toronado for $1,500 and now they're $5,500; now they're $6,000."
But I like to think these cars were going to the junk yard before and that, by publicizing them and showing what fantastic original American design they were, that I saved the cars for collectors. That's the way I look at it.
So, consequently, whether you have a TR3 or a McLaren, if you like it and it has some sort of pedigree, the chance is other people will like it, too, and it's actually a better investment I think than stocks or bonds because you can actually use it. If you buy stock and it plummets, well, certificates aren't much fun! You could maybe wallpaper something with them or look at them and look at the intricate little details and the etchings, but you can't do anything with it. But if you buy a car and you pay too much for it, you can drive it, enjoy it and have fun with it!
This is an excellent time to buy because it separates the real enthusiasts from the phoney baloney people. The speculators now will cut and run just as they did in the early '90s. There was that huge boom in the late '80s where anything that was red and said Ferrari was going for hundreds of thousands of dollars over what it was worth. Then it levelled out and just now prices are creeping back up. Daytonas were reasonable for a while; then [prices] went crazy and, who knows, they might become reasonable again.
The thing I tell people to be careful about is you always wanna try and buy, at least for me, anything pre-1980, because the one big secret is that if you buy yourself a 10-year-old Ferrari, there's almost nobody that can work on it other than a Ferrari authorized dealer.
You can't do anything at home, independents [repair shops] can't do anything because they won't have the electronic boxes and the electronic diagnostic tools to analyze it and go through it. You know, new cars now are becoming more and more like DVD players -- when they break, you just get another one! That's because it's almost impossible to repair and it is impossible for even the extremely talented do-it-yourselfer. The nice thing about older cars is they were built by hand and hands haven't changed much. Hands that could make something 50 years ago ... [well] hands today with skill could make that same thing. But you can't do that with electronics.
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