Rick's Retromobile on Google Earth

www.rickcarey.com/RetromobileParisFeb17-202007.kmz
is the link to the Google Earth overlay showing hotels, restaurants and auction locations during the recent Retromobile auction weekend in Paris.

Christie’s RetroMobile Auction

The headlines over the Auto Union Type D overshadowed the more significant fact that Christie’s had assembled an outstanding consignment of vehicles for its sale at Retromobile. Aside from a few ratty and neglected cars with celebrity ownership histories – the theme of this year’s RetroMobile show – the cars were unusual, intriguing and interesting.

Christie’s sold most of them, too, and for good money. The immediate post-sale numbers were 34 of 49 sold (69.4%) and $9,237,612 in total transactions.

Big numbers were made by the 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540K Cabriolet A at $1,604,733 and the ex-Pierre Levegh Talbot-Lago T26GS (a car that will get an invitation to just about any historic event its owner wants to attend) at $1,749,274.

The sale that got tongues wagging, however, was the 1890 deDion Bouton et Trepardeaux Steam Quadricycle which had bidders all over the place chasing it and made a mockery of its $236,000 high estimate. It wasn’t quite a Futurliner surprise, but it finally hammered sold at €635,000, €709,750 with commission, an astounding $932,618. That is a whole lot of money to pay for a very early starting time on the London-Brighton Run, but buyers were lined up ready to write the big check.

Christie’s anticipates offering the Auto Union Type D later in the year after the current uncertainty is resolved, perhaps at Monterey. Until then they can be proud of the results achieved in Paris and concentrate on lining up consignments for Greenwich, Connecticut to complement the barn-find Bugatti Type 57C (s/n 57766) with Atalante coupe coachwork that has already been consigned (estimate $300-400K.)

Rick Carey

Paris

I'm just back from a weekend (left Providence on Friday, returned Tuesday evening) in Paris which included the Retromobile show and the Christie's and Artcurial/Poulain auctions.
They're separate subjects: i.e., Paris, Retromobile, Christie's and Artcurial/Poulain.

This is about Paris.

I'd never been to Paris. I'd twice passed through Paris airports on the way to Le Mans for the 24 Heures and never had the chance to "waste" time sightseeing.
That was a mistake. Paris is wonderful.
Christie's let me in on the location of the hotel where their staff stays: the Select on Place de la Sorbonne, in the 5th Arondissement, on the Rive Gauche, in the Latin Quarter.

This note could go on for pages.

The Select Hotel Place de la Sorbonne is a couple blocks up the Boulevard Saint-Michel from the Place Saint-Michel on the Seine across the channel from the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame. The 5eme Arondissement is at a confluence of the history of Paris and the transportation system that goes to the sites of Retromobile and the Monday Poulain auction. That is about as good as it gets.

I'm a reader: eclectic, voluminous and tres impressionable. I have images of Paris etched in synapses going back decades. The reality of Paris exceeded the accumulated mental images of six decades of reading.

I never encountered a rude Parisian. No waiters, taxi drivers or street vendors ripped me off. None appeared to be willing to try, not even to uphold Paris's reputation for exploitation of tourists.
On one train ride out of the Saint-Michel RER station a guy came up and tapped me on the elbow. I figured I was being importuned and made dismissive gestures. He held up the train ticket I'd fed into the machine to enter the station. As it turns out, you can't get through the exit turnstile without your cancelled entry ticket.

He saved my ignorant American ass.

Paris really is a magical place. It has a human face and a practical interface, but at the same time is a center of science, culture, art and intellectual discourse. In Paris all discussions move up a notch or two on an intellectual plane.

Paris is not to be taken lightly, nor entirely seriously either. It's Paris. I'm sorry it took me this long to get there. But I'm glad it took this long, too.

NEVER pass up a chance to go to Paris.

Rick Carey
February 22,2007

Barrett-Jackson Responds

The B-J response (duplicate documents received from two purportedly authoritative sources) adds nothing to the exchange arising from the unsupported and uninformed "fourwheeldrift" internet blog posting.
Suffice to say, B-J hasn't rolled over and played dead.
Under the circumstances they shouldn't.


Rick Carey
February 21, 2007

Auto Union Type D Withdrawn

Christie's has announced in a one-sentence statement that the sale of the Auto Union Type D Grand Prix car has been "postponed".

The statement was the epitome of simplicity:

"Christie's today announced that it will postpone the sale of the 1939 Auto Union - Grand Prix V12 Type D race car from the February Retromobile sale in Paris pending further exploration into the car's race history, in collaboration with Audi Tradition."

Eager conspiracy theorists may avidly parse this sentence into its parts, but it is really quite clear.

It is about "race history". That's what it says. It's also about Audi Tradition's participation in the process. It says that, too.

The chances are it's just about which races this Type D ran, and which one(s) it won, just like the statement says.

Exactly why that should involve more than a saleroom notice is unclear. Conspiracy theorists would like to suggest a compromised history of its parts.

C'mon. All the Auto Union survivors got spirited away to the Soviet Union where they were mixed and matched like the parts of a suit at the GUM store. It is enough that the parts survived to be reunited into a running, driving, two-stage supercharged Auto Union Type D.

Hopefully some clarification will emerge from Retromobile. If it does it'll be here.

Rick Carey
February 12, 2007

RM Ft. Lauderdale, February 9-11, 2007
RM Auctions held its Florida Collector Car Auction over the weekend in a new location, the Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center at Port Everglades. It was quite a change from the Polo Club in Boca Raton.
The venue was indoors, in a vast exhibition space. Air conditioned, essentially dustless (and wasn't that ever a change from the fine silica grit, a jagged pumice, that permeated, penetrated and coated every surface, space and cranny at Boca), dry and well lighted. Close to heaven? Yes, although some grumbles were heard about the loss of the Polo Club ambience.
Good riddance to ambience. Heck, the Convention Center even had $5 Subway subs and white-suited chefs slicing New York deli sandwiches for eight bucks. $3 sodas were a bit much, but there were $4 "venti" lattes and cappuccinos in the lobby. Brewed with Starbucks.
[What about Rick's standard measure of auction venues, the rest rooms? Superb, plentiful, convenient and frequently and thoroughly cleaned. The Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center rest rooms qualify for a "2" on the rest room rating scale. What's a "1", you ask? The Ritz Carlton Amelia Island; they're not as convenient to the auction venue, but they're an order of magnitude more posh.]
The access was convoluted, being located within the confines of Port Everglades and its cruise ship access (can anyone remember the Achille Lauro?) and therefore subject to nearly-TSA security. That meant long lines at the entrances to present your photo ID and answer "Where are you going" and "Do you have any weapons" questions from officious Broward County Sheriff's Department functionaries.
Then it was $8-10 to park in the giant garage (but at least it was just across the street from the Convention Center and connnected by covered bridges.)
The space was shared with the "Baby Faire" [showing strollers that were technically more sophisticated than most of the $60,000 cars being sold at the auction], the Cosmetic Surgery Expo (no, really -- this is South Florida) and the Bridal Expo (apparently not related to the Baby Faire).
Next year the auction promises to have all the ground floor (thus avoiding embarassing comparisons between the cars and the strollers) which also should serve to reduce the security checkpoint and parking garage congestion.

Details out of the way, it's time to give Donnie Gould full credit for this auction, which has grown like Topsy since it began a few years ago and which has (and this isn't just my opinion) one of the best, most diverse, intriguing consignments of very high quality cars of any auction in the country.
458 cars crossed the block and each of them warranted a serious look. It wasn't the Pony Parade of a few weeks ago in Arizona. The consignment tended to be American, and for South Florida it was surprisingly light on German cars, but no one was going to be disappointed with either the quality or the diversity of the cars. It was very nice stuff, and it was displayed with taste and style, even in the somewhat constricted square footage of this year's auction space.

This is Florida, not Arizona. It was 75 degrees and muggy (which is why "air conditioned" came first earlier). There's a tendency to pastels, and even a Jimmy Buffett Falcon Futura among the cars. If anything "showoff" is a bigger deal here than in Arizona. Canadian and Upper Midwest "ehs" were very much in evidence.
The auction report should be done some time (not "sometime" although that could be used, too) next week, after I get back from Retromobile. It's worth waiting for.

Rick Carey
February 12, 2007

“Nevermore” Quoth the Raven

Unfortunately writers today seem to be quothing the Raven “evermore" than Poe, who created the conjoined forms “nevermore” and “evermore” as stylistic artifice for his poem “The Raven”.

Nevermore and evermore have nothing on today’s writers’ misuse of everyday, a handy word that means mundane, ordinary and commonplace. They frequently mean “every day”, as in happening once during each daily passage of the sun. The distinction once was clear. “Everyday” was boring. “Every day” was routine. Now each sentence using “everyday” has to be read carefully in an attempt to discern the author’s intent.

It’s not always clear, either. Do the educators at the University of Chicago intend the K-6 mathematics curriculum called “Everyday Mathematics” to describe humdrum, boring, uninteresting math, or neat math techniques and skills that get used every day? I’ll be damned if I know, and the Chicago mathematicians are likewise damned by the lack of precision in their product’s name. We can only hope the same lack of precision doesn't extend to their math curriculum.

It’s in the New York Times, and probably the Times of London. The editors don’t know the difference, won’t impress it on their writers and can’t be bothered to make it a hit in their spell checker.

There is an important – not even subtle – difference between every day and everyday. Our ability to communicate clearly is poorer for the demise of its recognition.

Rick Carey
February 5, 2007

The Barrett-Jackson Rumor Mill, Again

It’s no wonder Craig Jackson sometimes acts paranoid. How many times does Barrett-Jackson have to deal with uninformed rumors?

We’re still putting down the “the Futurliner didn’t sell for $4 million” stories, a year after the $3,680,000 (that’s the $4 million hammer bid less the 8% seller’s commission) wire transfer landed in Montreal.

This week it was “did you hear about the class action against B-J? It’s all over the Internet.”

Well, no I hadn’t, so I went looking.

I found someone named Sam Barer’s posting on his blog. A wide-ranging rant, it started off by accusing B-J of fraud (“some hobbyists are claiming a worst [sic]: fraud”), which must have gotten Mr. Jackson’s attention. Then there it was, Barer says someone “has filed papers with the court” and “this is already being discussed as translating into class-action status.”

Sam claims to be “a collector car journalist” who has “been watching the Barrett-Jackson auction for years.”

From reading his rambling posting it didn’t even appear that he was at B-J, much less on the block where he might have become aware of what goes on there so to find out I called the phone number for his company’s “Business Office.”

I reached Sam at home.

Not only wasn’t Sam at Barrett-Jackson this year, he’s never been to Barrett-Jackson at all. He has been “watching the Barrett-Jackson auction” though. On SPEED Channel. He watched the whole thing, he said – except for the parts he missed. And he “knows people” who’ve bought and sold cars at Barrett-Jackson.

When pressed, Sam admitted that he didn’t know if a suit had been filed. He further allowed that the “class action” was complete conjecture.

This is pathetic. Barrett-Jackson (and Craig Jackson and even Keith Martin who came in for his share of Barer-bashing) has been taking flack from someone who hasn’t any firsthand knowledge of what went on at Barrett-Jackson in 2007 (or any other year). He’s just dishing out recirculated rumors, then piling surmise and conjecture on top of them.

Barrett-Jackson has now issued a statement dealing with Mr. Barer’s rumors and surmise. The statement is clear, concise and factual, unlike the rambling rant that prompted it.

In the case of the lawsuit/class action rumor, there is no “there” there.

Craig Jackson isn’t the one who is paranoid.

Rick Carey
February 2, 2007