ONE of the great things to do in clog land is the Race Planet experience at the Zandvoort Circuit. Former F1 racer Michael Bleekemolen lets you drive a Lambo Gallardo, Aston Martin Vantage and Porsche around the track in the sand dunes for $600. This includes a lunch of Hollandse nieuwe haring (raw herrings with chopped onions).
Naturally, Mike insists the herrings are caught between May and July, and gutted aboard the boat with the pancreas left in the fish. Tradition says you eat it while holding it up in the air by the tail and dunking it into your mouth.
Presuming you have kept your lunch down, you may then want to drive for 15 minutes to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. Don’t worry, there’s only one painting you need to see. It’s Hendrick Gerritsz Pot’s Flora’s Wagon of Fools. (By the way, isn’t Pot an appropriate name for someone who used to live so close to Amsterdam?)
Mr Pot’s oil on canvas depicts the tulip mania of the 17th century with Flora, the goddess of flowers, carrying tulips, surrounded by weavers who have left their jobs wearing tulips in their hair.
While the tulip bubble wasn’t as bad as everyone now says, it’s true the price for a ‘Viceroy’ tulip bulb got as high as two lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, eight pigs, 12 sheep, two barrels of wine, four tonnes of butter, 1000 pounds (454kg) of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes and a silver cup — or, in today’s money, the cost of a set of brake pads for your BMW or Audi. Anyway, by 1637, Gordon Gekko tells us, the market had tanked and you could buy 10 bulbs for $2.
The tulip bubble, the dotcom bubble, the South Seas bubble, the art bubble and the Sydney property bubble are all examples of the greater fool theory in action.
This theory stipulates that no matter what you pay for something — shares, art or property — it doesn’t matter because sooner or later a greater fool will come along and pay even more.
And that brings us to the current classic car market. US blogmaster Michael Ballaban told us last week: “The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up! The S&P 500 is up! Nasdaq is way up! But none of those have anything on the collector car market, which is nothing short of absolute insanity at the moment.”
Mike says the price of a 300SL Gullwing has increased by more than 150 per cent since 2010. Ferrari buyers have done even better.
As our friend Dave Kinney, the world’s top authority on car values, says: “If blue-chip cars are hot, then Ferraris are radioactive.”
Overall, classic Ferrari prices have gone up 500 per cent since September 2010. But if you bought a 1963 Ferrari 250 LM two-door coupe for $4.5 million in 2006, or waited three years and paid $5.5m, today you’d be sitting in a V12 beast worth $24m.
While price pushers will give you all sorts of reasons why, the bottom line is the top end of the classic market has become like the top-end art market. Late last year Andrew Warhol’s Triple Elvis, a 1963 silk-screen with not a tulip or large-busted Greek goddess in sight, sold for $102m at Christie’s.
Read on at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/executive-living/motoring/vintage-car-market-is-breaking-price-barriers/story-fngmee2f-1227210290886
