I know you lie awake at night thinking about what to do with the $20 million you’ve got sitting around in accounts at Trasta Komercbanka, Promsvyazbank and Citibank. Strangely enough there’s a lot of people who don’t even know how to think about issues like this. Take lottery winners.
Some punter wins $10m or $15m in the lottery and what does he do? Goes out and buys two Holden Commodore SSs, puts a man cave with spa, bar and giant screen TV into the brick veneer home, has cosmetic surgery including a tummy tuck, buys a house each for his ungrateful kids, takes his snivelling relatives on some luxury holidays, gets divorced and ends up on the dole.
Then there’s the do-gooders. Steve Gillman, the author of 101 Weird Ways to Make Money, tells the story of Canada’s Ibi Roncaioli who won a $5m lottery prize. Soon afterwards, she gave $2m of her winnings to a child she had secretly had with a man who was not her husband. When her husband, gynaecologist Joseph Roncaioli, discovered the truth, he poisoned his wife. He went to jail for manslaughter, but not before reportedly asking Ibi’s family for help in paying for her funeral.
You and I don’t think like that.
If we had a sudden windfall and we weren’t on the radar of the fiscal fiends at the ATO we’d buy the best supercar on the market today for thin people, the McLaren 720S ($500,000 drive away, no more to pay for the first 100km), grab a few cash-rich trendy pubs and put in three extra pokies for ourselves and set up a medicinal cannabis farm.
Now if you are a prominent Sydney or Melbourne businessperson my advice is to buy a Ford BA ute, slip in a 428 Cobra Jet engine, have Garth Walden do the suspension, add the Brembo brakes and put Hankook R specs on each corner.
Then buy a 1989 BMW 318iis, drop in a three-litre BMW Alpina engine and add E30 M3 running gear and do a few rallies. That’s distracted the ATO and the media. Then last Tuesday you hopped on the plane to Scottsdale, Arizona, to decide what you will buy to use out of your hermetically sealed 10-car garage with sophisticated man cave in Aspen.
Yes, friends and others, there are seven classic car auctions around Scottsdale this week and they’re hoping to sell more than $350m worth of metal to investors like you and me. The only thing I can guide you on is that E-Types will keep on going up and everything else is in a period of, let’s call it, consolidation.
Barrett-Jackson has been pumping the cars through since last Saturday and by the end of tomorrow it will have moved more than 1700 cars for somewhere north of $130m. I’m looking at the 1966 Shelby GT350. This has a great history. A pre-production prototype and the first Shelby GT350 built for 1966, it was the primary test car for the GT350 development program and the first Shelby Mustang to be shown at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Look to pay about $150,000 over book and it should be yours at $400,000. Barrett-Jackson is drawing a big crowd at Westworld’s covered Equidome. And it’s no wonder with Drew Turner, the Summer Slam Down Bid Calling Champion of 2014, calling the auction. Earlier this week I saw Drew sell a fully restored Triumph TR3 for $25,000 (or about $23,000 too much for any Triumph) without understanding a word he said.
After the auction join me at the Skeptical Chymist, which is really an Irish pub with a display of pharmacy items from the old country. Owner Trevor Kingston says “as well as providing the people of Scottsdale with a glimpse of Ireland you can sample the delights of Irish cuisine and beverages”. Yup, the Belfast Burger is $15 and you can wash it down with a Carlsberg lager for not much more.
Bonhams has a beautiful 1958 ex-factory works team Porsche 550A Spyder. Fifth at Le Mans in 1958 and a class winner at 1000km Nurburgring, it can be yours for $6.5m.
Hate to say it but my favourite at Scottsdale this week is the 1955 Alfa Romeo 1900C SS Speciale that RM Sotheby’s has on the blocks. Straight from best in class at Pebble Beach this year, this Mario Boana design influenced the looks of other supercars like Ferrari and, you would have to think, the Jaguar E-Type. While Mario was a pretty out-there designer he was so well regarded in the profession that, on his deathbed, Giacinto Ghia instructed his wife to call Mario Boano and have him save the company. Which, of course, he did. Maybe $2m will get you this.
Dave Gooding has a very low mileage 6.0-litre twin-turbo V12 2014 Pagani Huayra producing 540kw ready for sale. It’s good for 383km/h on America’s fastest road, the 67km stretch of Interstate 10 near Seguin, Texas. Yours for $3m.
Big response to the road toll column last week. As reader Ralph Smallhorn writes: “It is time for a forensic analyst to look at the history of the problem so magistrates can no longer duck and weave their way out of admitting that the problem exists.”
Ralph mentioned a book I had read some years ago, Criminals On The Road: A Study of Serious Motoring Offences and Those Who Commit Them, where a criminologist called Terence Willett researched drivers involved in fatal crashes and concluded that serial road offenders were either inadequate or mentally ill or both! And not all that smart. If you look at recent well-publicised crashes, you’ll see he was on the money.
If you are looking for a lighter read try the The Weekend Australian Racing Team’s own Michael McMichael’s new book, Sex In A Parking Station: Why It’s Wrong On So Many Levels.
