by John Glynn | Mar 10, 2016 | Classic Porsche Blog, Market & Prices
Tomorrow is the Gooding & Co auction sale in Amelia Island, where noted Porsche collector, Jerry Seinfeld, is selling a number of his cars. Eighteen soon-to-be ex-Seinfeld cars including sixteen Porsche models will cross the auction block in this huge sale, which has just twenty-nine Porsches entered in total.
Talking to an American collector friend, this batch of cars is estimated to be circa ten percent of the complete Seinfeld collection. The famous comedian buys and sells many cars – I’ve driven some ex-Seinfeld machinery myself – but most previous sales have been well and truly under the radar. Dealers entrusted with Jerry’s cars who have tried to cash in on the Seinfeld kudos as part of their pitch have allegedly not had an easy ride afterwards, so it is no great surprise that an auction was chosen to dispose of this sizeable tranche, or that Gooding got the commission: the famous Amelia Island sale is the premier East Coast auction in the US and comes just as the market starts to gather pace following the lulls of winter. Many record Porsche prices have been achieved by Gooding at this sale.
Seinfeld shares Porsche Excitement
“The reason I wanted to bid these cars farewell in this way is really just to see the look of excitement on the faces of the next owners, who I know will be out of their minds with joy that they are going to get to experience them,” says Jerry. “Each one of these cars is a pinnacle of mechanical culture to me. Many are the best examples that exist in the world. I’ve loved being entrusted with their care, and I’m proud of the level to which we have brought each and every one of these wonderful machines. Honestly, if I had unlimited time, space and attention span I would never sell one of them.”
Situated in the north-east corner of Florida just inside the Georgia border, the almost perfectly named Fernandina Beach is finely dressed in Southern Victorian architecture and lined with more than thirteen miles of beaches. It’s a great escape for the rich and famous, but there will be no escaping market forces when twenty of Seinfeld’s own Porsche cars cross the podium from 11am tomorrow.
Classic Porsche Prices Market Trend
Prices at the very top end of the classic Porsche market have tailed off in recent months – at least for the cars you see at open sale. Sellers claim that many deals are done behind closed doors for stronger prices than seen in public, but even in these secret deals for the very best cars, buyers are applying pressure. Twenty percent off a $5 million car is a sizeable discount, so if the market is showing obvious softness, and both parties know it, there’s a poker game happening.
Doing eighteen poker deals behind closed doors, most likely through middle men, would be a long and expensive pain in the arse for Herr Seinfeld. Sending these cars to auction, with ten weeks of everywhere promotion, and a glitzy end-of-sale in prospect for Jerry, looking at the faces of buyers set to be “out of their minds with joy” is a reasonable recipe for respite from a high-end Porsche market that has consistently failed to deliver record-breaking prices since the middle of last year.
Affordable Classic Porsche prices remain steady
Further down the price range, our Porsche Valuations market price tracker is seeing continued health in the market for cheaper classic Porsches. Collectable RHD water-cooled 911s are in fine form, with low mileage Porsche 996 GT3s and GT3 RS models selling quickly. Good RHD Porsche 930s are still good sellers, as are RHD 911 3.2 G50 Carreras (especially the Club Sport) and 964 Carrera 2 models in top condition.
Seinfeld’s big hitters – the 550 Spyder, 718 RSK, and 917/30 – will fetch what they fetch and add to the existing market trend info, but more interesting will be the market for the Carrera GT prototype. Bought by Seinfeld directly from Porsche, and disabled before purchase from any possibility of being driven, this handmade CGT prototype has never been previously offered to the market. For some, it may be a potential jewel in the crown of a water-cooled Porsche collection, for others it is a pricey handmade paperweight. If any car were to illustrate prevailing price sentiment amongst serious Porsche collectors, then this should be it.
My favourites in the big Seinfeld sell-off are the Volkswagens: a 1964 Volkswagen Camper with less than 20k miles in simply perfect condition and a beautiful 1960 VW Beetle in original, unrestored condition, with just 15,500 miles on the clock. Of all these cars for sale, why sell this one? Assuming America turns out for Amelia, a top estimate of $55k on the Beetle could prove significantly behind the market. I would be keeping this car: it would be the last car I’d sell. Which means that Seinfeld has even nicer Beetles. Lucky man.
All images copyright and courtesy of Gooding & Company. 550 Photo by Mathieu Heurtault. Other photos by Brian Henniker.
by John Glynn | Jan 21, 2016 | Market & Prices, Porsche News
Official UK Porsche dealer, Porsche Centre Bolton has lost a court battle with the aggrieved would-be buyer of a Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0 who was gazumped by the dealership following confirmation of order.
Portrayed in a slightly frantic local press report as a duped and dispossessed pensioner (the buyer may not be entirely delighted about this), local enthusiast and classic car restorer Kevin Hughes (67) put a £10,000 deposit down on a 997 GT3 RS 4.0 back in March 2011 and was emailed by the sales department to say “I can confirm that you will get the first one from Porsche Centre Bolton if we get one, which I am very confident that we will”.
Some time later, OPC Bolton told Mr Hughes that they had actually not received any 4-litres, and returned his deposit. When Mr Hughes discovered that they had in fact been allocated a 4-litre RS but had secretly sold it to someone else, the shit hit the fan and Hughes commenced proceedings against OPC Bolton’s owners, Pendragon Sabre Ltd.
The deposit was paid in March 2011, but the case has only just come to court. This tells you that the legal costs are not insignificant. The court ruled that OPC Bolton had lied, found in favour of Hughes and awarded him £35,000 in damages, which was said to be the current value of a RHD 4-litre minus the original cost new. They also awarded costs, so Pendragon will have to pay Hughes’ legal bills as well as its own.
“Plain as a pikestaff” is how the judge described the binding contract between Mr Hughes and OPC Bolton. By paying a deposit up front, Kevin Hughes had done more than just expressed a passing interest and the sales team had promised him the first car in writing. The secret sale behind Hughes’ back of the one car which the dealership received was therefore a clear breach of contract, according to the judge.
Given that RHD 4-litres are fetching far more than £170k to collectors, I think Pendragon has got away lightly. Thanks to a decade valuing cars for a living and now running my UK Porsche insurance valuations service, I get called in to legal disputes as an expert every once in a while. Hughes’ legal team should have googled a values expert for this one: their client might be a hundred grand better off now.
An old friend of mine works at OPC Bolton. I’m sure there are two sides to the story – maybe one day I will hear the rival viewpoint – but it seems to have looked pretty cut and dried to the judge.
by John Glynn | Dec 18, 2015 | Classic Porsche Blog, Market & Prices, Modified Porsche Hot Rods
I’m working outside the UK at the minute, catching some winter sun in Fuerteventura. As ever, I’ve brought a few books along in case of long lunches, including ‘We are Porsche’: Ferry Porsche’s first autobiography, written with John Bentley in the early 1970s.
I’ve read this book many times, as Ferry’s words both inspire and encourage. All freelancers face constant changes and challenges, which can often feel insurmountable. Ferry’s story demonstrates that, no matter what life throws in one’s path, patient perseverance will find a solution. Hard work and the occasional retreat to simple pleasures can power body and mind through tough situations.
Ferry Porsche and his BMW Motorcycle
As a young man, one of Ferry’s simplest pleasures was motorcycling. At the age of eighteen, Ferry got his motorcycle licence and shares how the independence of increased mobility brought new opportunities to meet girls. “I no longer had to rely on the family car to get me from one place to another in a hurry,” he recalls. “The motorbike I then used was a 500cc BMW and this proved useful in more ways than one.”
This would have been circa 1927, making Ferry’s bike an R42: Max Fitz’s blueprint for just about every BMW road bike made afterwards. Pristine R42s now sell for big money – £40k or more – so Ferry’s mount was well chosen. Given Doctor Porsche’s interest in BMW motorcycles, I wonder what he’d make of the machine seen here, being offered by Bonhams at its Paris sale on February 4th: a 1952 Sunbeam S8, with Ferry Porsche power.
BSA bought the rights to Sunbeam’s motorcycle business in 1943 and revived the brand after the war, when it was given German motorcycle designs as part of the war reparations. Based on the BMW R75, the Sunbeam S7 had a pre-war-designed inline twin which left it low on power, and its successor, the Sunbeam R8 was apparently not much better.
Porsche Engine in a Motorcycle Frame
In 1969, the then owner of this S8 decided to upgrade the power with a 1200cc motor from a Volkswagen Beetle. This was not the ultimate incarnation, as he subsequently ditched the Beetle engine, replacing it with a 1955 1300cc Porsche motor featuring bespoke cast aluminium bellhousing and rocker covers.
The Sunbeam’s first outing was to the 1972 BMF show, where it caused a sensation. MCN’s John Ebbrell tested the bike for the paper, and the Sunbeam was also shown at Olympia, fitted with Amal concentric carburettors a la Triumph and others. A BMW tank was added later, along with Norton Roadholder forks and some other cool touches, including a Vincent Black Shadow speedometer.
For sale due to the advancing age of its owner, the Sunbeam was offered at Bonhams’ last sale in the RAF Museum at Hendon where it failed to find a new home. Given that the price aspirations seem sensible (£9.5k), I was surprised by this, so I emailed Bill To at Bonhams to get his thoughts on why such an interesting piece failed to sell.”We were a little surprised ourselves, but I guess that’s the nature of public auctions: we just don’t know what to expect on the day,” said Bill.
I’m not the world’s biggest vintage bike fan, but I do like this. If it’s something you are also inspired by, get yourself to Paris on February 4th, or contact Bonhams to register as a bidder. I want a ride if you buy it!
by John Glynn | Sep 19, 2015 | Porsche News
Had a bit of a Porsche blog sabbatical while working on other projects and building my new Porschehaus garage & office. Porsche’s Mission E concept, a new 911 with turbochargers as standard and Magnus smashing his 911 into a parked truck with a journalist on board didn’t get me excited enough to pick up a keyboard, but today’s news regarding Porsche’s parent Volkswagen kickstarted some action.
A year after this story first broke in the UK’s Sunday Times (as reported on ConsultEV), America’s Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the recall of almost half a million Volkswagen group cars sold in the US since 2008, after uncovering cheat software in Volkswagen group diesel cars designed to lower emissions when being run through emissions testing. The defeat device software knocks Nitrogen Dioxide emissions down for testing, but NO2 emissions are up to 40 times higher than levels permitted in the USA at all other times.
Toxic by inhalation, Kings College in London blamed Nitrogen Dioxide for 9,500 deaths in the city during 2010. The Nitrogen Dioxide emissions cheat software has so far been located on just five VW And Audi cars tested by the EPA, but every car found to be running the cheat software will incur a penalty of some $40k for its manufacturer. The maths apparently totals to almost $18 billion for Volkswagen in the US.
The bigger story will come from the fallout in Volkswagen’s other markets, paticularly back home in Germany. Also count on a slew of class action lawsuits against VW in the super-litigious USA. Perhaps the most bemusing aspect to this story is that emissions cheating is absolutely commonplace in vehicle testing. From my own conversations with car manufacturer-employed friends over the years, it seems that most if not all modern manufacturer ECUs are programmed with cheat software, designed to recognise throttle patterns common to rolling road emissions testing and shut down as much combustion as possible while the tests are being carried out.
A recent European Union report says that real-world emissions from cars can be up to 40% higher than seen in emissions approval testing, so this Volkswagen story is just the tip of the iceberg. You’d think the EPA would have known about this all along. I smell a rat in a Tesla lab coat, or maybe an EPA bod who stopped getting hush money. Either way, you know the discovery is no real shock to the emissions testing system: it’s a PR campaign designed to shock consumers and batter VW.
How does this affect Porsche? Well, imagine if your dad was fined $18 billion and 50,000 Americans started suing him. You would bloody know about it.
by John Glynn | Aug 18, 2015 | Classic Porsche Blog, Market & Prices
Regular readers will know that I occasionally sell classic Porsche cars for friends. My designer friend James has asked me to sell this interesting 911 for him, due to lack of time to use it (car is now sold – thanks all). It’s a 1985 Porsche 911 3.2 Carrera Coupe with above average mileage, but it’s had a huge amount of work done professionally and is now a very nice car. I’ll be putting it on eBay and Pistonheads later, so get in touch if it’s something you’re looking for.
Porsche 911 Restoration
Bought by James in 2007, this right-hand drive 1985 911 Carrera showed 185,000 miles on the clock, had been much enjoyed by its one previous owner and needed some restoration. James took the car to Tuthill Porsche and had the bodywork restored: the front wings were replaced, and common impact-bumper 911 rust spots like the inner front wing tops, front bumper mounts, windscreen apertures, sills and kidney bowls were repaired before the car was repainted in its apparently original colour of Viper Green.
At this time, the aluminium bumpers were also replaced with lightweight Ruf-style bumpers: anyone who has taken the bumpers off their impact-bumper car knows how much weight that saves and how much better the car feels to drive. Impact-bumper blades could easily be refitted if one preferred that style, or fit Speedline wheels for the full Ruf look.
Classic Porsche Maintenance Costs
The original colour is Speedway Green, which is a shade away from its current colour. Greens like this were not offered on 3.2 Carrera Coupes, so consider this car one of one. I have the bills for the last seven years and more than £10,000 has been spent on mechanical upkeep at Tuthills, including a full gearbox rebuild with replacement crownwheel and pinion, and a recent service, new brakes, new Bosch battery and MOT, costing £1500. This does not include the body restoration or the engine rebuild, both carried out at Tuthills.
I spent most of yesterday driving this 911 and it is superb on the road: as good as any 3.2 I have ever driven. The rebuilt engine pulls cleanly and is very strong on power: a treat to use with that rebuilt Porsche 915 transmission. The interior is good: Grey Beige leather with electric front seat height, all working fine. Hand stitched extended leather to door pulls and storage pocket lids: another factory option.
Porsche 911 3.2 Carrera for sale
Seats are in good shape, with only minor bolster wear showing on the driver’s side. The 911 also has a Momo steering wheel, which is very nice to use. The sunroof works well, as does the optional rear wiper on the flat rear engine cover. Rear seats are in nice condition: no rear seat belts are fitted. The car has a Sony CD player and comes with the jack, compressor and the original toolkit (that needs restoration but a nice job for someone).
I had a good look around the car and found a few minus points.
- The sunroof seal needs replacing
- Crack in the front bumper under one side grille
- The leather dashtop has a small split to the left of the binnacle
- Optional black headlining sagging around the sunroof
- Front wiper arms a bit scruffy
- One rear floor carpet is missing: an aftermarket mat is in its place
- Heater works but service invoice notes that the flaps could do with replacing
Bodywork is always the big concern on a 911, and no 911 is rust free. Expect to do a bit here and there over the next five years to keep the bodywork in A1 condition. I can see a few little bits but nothing overly concerning. Other than that it looks a good example and drives exceptionally well on very good tyres. I will update this post with more history as and when it becomes available.
Classic Porsche 911 Prices
As for price, let me put my professional Porsche valuations hat on for this bit. Solid 911 Carreras in similar condition generally hit the market with 125-135k miles and now sell for about £38-40k privately. They also usually come with Fuchs wheels: a set would cost circa £1500. This car has clocked up about 25k miles since restoration, so now has 212k miles on the clock, but remember this Porsche has had a huge amount invested in its upkeep over the last eight years and I cannot fault how it drives.
Adjusting for the mileage, the absence of Fuchs – which most buyers will budget to fit – and making a generous adjustment for the condition issues raised above, I’ve set a selling price of £24,995 (now sold) to buy a great classic 911 that is ready to use right now.
The car is with me near Banbury. I can pick you up from the nearest train station (Banbury) or if you are up in Scotland or in Ireland etc, you can fly in to Birmingham and catch a direct train down to inspect. It is ready to drive home once taxed and insured. I can also organise transport to any UK port for overseas shipping. Contact me with any questions.
