RM Maranello

RM Auctions' sale at Ferrari in Maranello on May 20 was an all-round smash success. All but one car and four of the many items of Ferrari memorabilia were sold on the block.
$45 million changed hands. Records were set everywhere, including $9 1/4 million for the 1962 330 TRI/LM Testa Rossa.
It's tempting to use the word "amazing" but that doesn't credit RM's years of effort to position the company for this opportunity. It doesn't credit the mouths of effort by Mike Fairbairn, Max Girardo, Shelby Myers and the team in Blenheim.
It was a marvelous event, put on with diligence, class, style and quality. The atmosphere at Ferrari's Pista di Fiorano was magic.
Michael Schumacher took the auction's 599GTB out for a few hot laps on Saturday, and F1 test driver Luca Badoer took the TRI/LM out for an Italian Tuneup so it would have its throats cleared for its new owner.
This was a week to be remembered. Not least by RM Auctions, who stepped up onto the top step of the collector car auction world.

Detroit Auto Companies Ownership

Recent coverage of the acquisition of Chrysler Group by Cerberus Capital has in both the NY Times and Detroit News said something like, "Never before has one of [the Detroit majors] been outside the control of another major automotive company" (Detroit News).
That is unfortunately grossly inaccurate.
The most important contradiction is DuPont's control of GM's from WWI until the Fifties. DuPont's influence over GM was sufficiently egregious that it got the attention of the US Department of Justice in the late 40's, brought an adverse decision by the US Supreme Court in the late Fifties and forced divestiture of DuPont's GM stock in 1961.
Even a cursory reading of Alfred P. Sloan's "My Years with General Motors" reveals abundant references to the importance of DuPont's financial and managerial support of GM in the Durant and post-Durant era. Sloan made no bones about it, and was in fact proud of what DuPont accomplished for GM and what GM accomplished for DuPont.
DuPont's website acknowledges the relationship.
It is revisionism, ignorance or an unfortunate desire to make more of the Cerberus acquisition -- which doesn't need to restate history to establish its significance -- than actually exists to suggest that non-automotive control of a major Detroit player is an isolated instance.
Perhaps even more significant is Curtiss-Wright's control of Studebaker-Packard during the final days of that Detroit legend's history. Not only is it analogous to Cerberus's acquisition of struggling Chrysler but at the time Studebaker-Packard was U.S. distributor of Mercedes-Benz automobiles.
How soon we forget.

Rick Carey

Comes Around

I happened to be working on an old auction (RM Meadow Brook 2002) which wasn't entered back in the day, and I was struck by the cars that have just disappeared into collector car nirvana.
There were some very nice, but rather rough, restoration project cars at the Meadow Brook auction in 2002. Cars that would happily take their place on any CCCA CARavan or concours lawn up to and including Pebble Beach. The ones that sold have, basically, disappeared which demonstrates the vast car collecting sponge which waits for good cars, giving them caring, enthusiastic, sympathetic long term homes.
There's so much drivel handed out about "investments" and "flipping" that evidence of it rises to the top of the pile. In fact most collector cars simply disappear into the maw of caring owners who want to work on them, preserve them, drive them and share them with others on tours and events and in shows and concours.
Fortunately, car collecting is still more about collecting than it is about commerce.

Rick Carey