Insane Prices for Vintage Ferraris

Insane indeed!

Every year prior to Monterey a bunch of vintage cars appear at wild asking prices. The nice driver 275GTS at R&M in February sold for $242K. Sheehan's 275 looks to be an equal or lesser car, but it's hard to tell without a hands on inspection. All it takes is one banker from San Francisco, bonus check in hand, to stumble into Fantasy Junction next Saturday and decide he must have that little Ferrari roadster for a weekend drive to Napa.......

 

Yes, I got that mailer too. Well, lets see, a 275 gts for 1/3mil or hemi cuda for 1mil. Whats a guy to do??

 

I don't know if $350K is the right price - I'm not a vintage expert by any stretch -- but to be fair, a 275 GTS is a rare car, unlike some of the old American iron. I think $350K is an idiotic price (for those of us who actually have to think about how much we spend on what...) for a modern production Ferrari, excluding the limited supercars.

Not only is the vintage stuff truly rare, but it has required a chain of caring owners -- or huge restoration expense -- to keep it in top condition. You can't just run down to Pep Boys and pick up a redone Ferrari V-12. Seems to me like most/many of the guys spending money on these cars are wiser than muscle car/mid-life crisis type.

 

FYI, the RM car was a "nice driver" for only about 25 miles, then it developed major driveshaft issues. It was only put back on the road last week. (But it IS a beautiful car.)

 

okay, i personally do not get the muscle car craze eithier. however if you think that you can run down to your local pep boys for parts to keep the car in its stock and desirable condition, you're in for a shock. the NOS parts are far and few. most stuff is NLA which meens some guys are having to go aftermarket repros. those all affect value, and those NOS parts are ungodly expensive.

my buddy has a '69 rs/ss vert camero (i know doesn't everybody) anyway, he's anut about it being stock original. if the part wasn't made in '68~'69 it's not going ont the car. he has spent $$$$ on just replacement stock parts. the cars worth 6 figures becouse everything is stil factory original and untouched.

sure now pep boys/kragen take your pick of the locals, can keep your older car on the road with parts but it is not going to be worth much. what i'll never understand is the value given to teh restorods. the reason most shops do restorods is the parts to make it original do not exist or are far to cost prohibitive to make it worth it. imagine some point in the future wher hybrid (ford/ferrari) cars are being done becouse the factory parts are NLA and used are $$$$$$$$$. then what?

now for why the older cars are going for stupid big $$$$$, probably becouse of the above. i'll never buy one so it's not my headache. but when you have the scratch to play up there it's another thought process alltogether.

 

Insane? Stupid? Nah ....

Certainly high, but ... for the buyer, so what? Market is market. I like to feel I've bought well as much as the next guy but, if you're not buying as an investment, but because you love the car, and if you know the price trends, who can say you overpaid? I paid up last year for a low mileage Ferrari, but it was one I've wanted for years, and I have no plans to sell. Well bought? To me, yes. A few years ago I threw dollars at restoring what is now, at best, a $20k car - simply because it had huge sentimental value, it was the exact car (not same model ... same car) on which I learned to drive. Waste of money? Not for me.

If you're buying as a parking place for cash, instead of securities or real estate, then perhaps the analysis is different.

 

I would take the numbers matching hemi Cuda...the American muscle cars that are selling for those high numbers are the very rare ones that very few remain...not the base badge models that thousands were made...

 

All I have to say about prices is.....KEEP GOING UP BABY! UP UP UP UP.......

 

For my 2 cents I will say that I'm not a rich guy and just recently purchased a 79 308 coupe. I fell in love with this car the year the model came out which coincidentley was the year I graduated from High School. It is in pretty excellant shape , but is and always will be a drivers car. I drive it a lot. About 1000 miles a month. I will always put into it whatever it needs to stay safe and reliable and good looking. I don't understand having a car and not driving it, which is the problem with big-money restorations. Every mile decreases the value.

I love muscle cars, but except for the motors most times they were not great cars when new. Part of my twisted self-justification for the Ferrari over the muscle is that at the end of the day I will have a car worth (quality-engineering etc.) what it was new. About $30,000. whereas the musclecar measured under the same criteria will always be a $5000 (or whatever) car. The extra money with musclecars is all emotion.
By the way the F-car is as good as I dreamed for 30 or so years and even more fun to drive. I really hope the guy who pays whatever for the muscle car gets the same satisfaction, because that makes it worth every penny.

 

I came to the vintage Ferrari scene with buying money in hand in late summer '02, at the relatively advanced age of 52, and already have stories.

If only...I'd gotten a home-eq loan and bought the nice Lusso that Sheehan had up for $130K; I think about the same time he had a 275 GTS that had been owned by some celeb, for $145K.

The best 330 2+2 out there could have been bought for $50K, now that's $100K+.

No regrets, I'm happy with my car and investment, and can drive it without feeling like I'm cruising around in a major financial holding. The downside is a very major mech repair or rebuild, which wouldn't be a concern if I had gone higher end.

 

Numbers matching - yeah right. Back when these cars were new they blew the engines left right and center and the installing mechanic never restamped the BLANK vin pad on the warranty engine so now 30 years later its numbers matching again. I had a hemi runner, sold it and glad I did - what a turd to drive. Bottom line is any muscle car from the 60's and 70's isnt worth the price if you consider what you are actually getting physically, how it does the job or what went into it when it was designed. They are turds, mass produced and ill handling. After beginning the restoration of my 308 I realized it is 4 times the car my 6 pack cuda was (that I also restored).

The tables will turn and smart buyers will look towards the exotics again when they realize they were screwing themselves for paying what they did for such an under-engineered (cool looking) car.

 

That'll happen when B-J (Craig) decides he wants it too again. Amazing how one man can turn the tide in the collector car market. And then the "old-guard" of F-Cars will have to realize there's more then just cars built before 1971 that are worthy of the name Ferrari.

 

Now shown as SOLD!

 

Quick thoughts:

My 330 S2 is common for vintage 12s, 455 S2s over 3 years; a bit over 1100 330 2+2s ever made in all flavors. How many 550s were built (not per year - total)?

Vintage Ferraris are hand built - Modern cars are not (hand finishing doesn't count).

Vintage cars are 40+ years old, restoration is VERY expensive, nice originals are VERY rare factor either into the price.

Vintage Ferrari's are exciting to drive below arrest me speeds, new Ferraris are not (they are just too good!).


Relative to what else you can buy for the money, vintage Ferraris are cheap. Classic 12s are almost free.

Regards,

Art S.

 

Keep in mind that the cars back then weren't about handling at all. Most people buying the big displacment cars were going to the drags not your local road coarse.

And on that note the craze is great but terrible imo. Basic prices for cancer ridden challengers chargers, mustangs are reaching 50k with a decent paint job which is rediculous. All you have to do is look on ebay and see. Hell even rollers are going for 6-10k. Bloody stupidity.

But on the good side a lot of parts are being made now, and we're even seeing repro bodies, i only hope they make the 67-68 fastbacks in repro.

 

The guys who were raised on those muscle cars are now getting long in the tooth, the kids are out on their own, the mausoleum has been traded down to a retirement cottage, maybe the ex is remarried, and now there's liquid assets burning a hole in the pockets of someone who is missing their youth.

Didn't any of you see Manchild?

It's like the warbird craze a few years back, when the WWII generation got retrospective.

 

I'm old enough to remember the 80's when the Ferrari market charts looked the same as they do today,maybe we are ready for a correction!

 

At the height of the 1980's insanity, some cars like Daytonas traded at more than 3X today's level when Asian and Middle Eastern buyers pulled cars out of Europe and the US. Now the strong Euro, up an additional 10% in the past six months against the US dollar and at an all time high against the Yen is allowing European buyers to bring back across the pond.

 

Last time I checked, P-51s were still going for a pretty penny! Have they gone down in price in the last few years?

 

Well, if you were looking for a muscle car ten years ago, you could always find an old one lying around that someone thought wasn't worth much. So if you had a restored one, you could only ask so much before the buyer would go the barn-find route. But now, people are pulling all the old ones out of the barns.

Same with P-51s. No new ones are being built, and there aren't many sitting forgotten in some corner of an airfield somewhere anymore.

After half the barn-found muscle cars are hacked up by "stylists" like you see on some of those Discovery channel shows, there will be all the fewer original muscle cars around. So the price of unmolested ones probably won't be going back down any time soon.

 

Parts availability and cost and labor costs are where muscle car ownership has its advantage over vintage exotics...I can attest to this, having owned a '69 Corvette and my current '64 330 in the last 10 years...just about every part is available NOS or repro for Corvettes and all the popular musclecars, much cheaper than Ferrari parts.

 

I sure as hell wouldn't rely on what Sheehan thinks to base my opinion of the Fcar market...

As to this car showing 'sold', which buddy/broker of Sheehan's 'bought' it ?

 

I saw this car in a service shop yesterday getting a few items sorted. It appeared to be in pretty good condition from what I could see - car was purchased by an end user.