Seller’s Remorse and the Dreaded Buy-Back Syndrome

By Peter Egan

Having somehow reached advanced adulthood in reasonable health, it’s been a recurring dream of mine to win the mega-million-dollar Powerball Sweepstakes and spend my retirement years tracking down and buying back all the cars and motorcycles I once owned.

I’ve had a roughly equal number of cars and motorcycles over the years – about 95 of each – so I’d probably have to hire a good detective agency to help with the search. Or maybe an archeologist, in some cases. I suspect my dangerously rusty ’66 Ford Ranch Wagon tow car is now one with the earth and only the plastic parts remain. It was last seen at a bumpy railroad crossing, where the frame broke in half and all the side windows popped out.

Naturally, the vast funds from Powerball would also allow me to build a large museum-like structure to contain all these cars and bikes. This would be located close to our house so that on cold winter evenings I could pour myself a single-malt scotch and stroll through the building to ponder all these vehicles, remembering the past or just soaking up the esthetic charm that drew me to them in the first place. Any proper garage, regardless of vehicle count, is really just an art gallery for the mechanically inclined.

Sadly, I’ve yet to win any form of lottery, but the allure of certain designs never fades and some of us are always on the lookout for a nice example of a car or bike that won our hearts years ago and that we soon regretted selling. Occasionally, the exact vehicle turns up for sale again and we are helpless not to act. This has happened to me only a few times.

Some years ago, I sold a 1964 Porsche 356B to an old friend in California. It was a nice car, burgundy in color, but I’d decided I needed a Reynard Formula Continental to go racing that season, rather than a pleasant old sportscar in the garage. About three years later my friend suffered a minor stroke and was no longer able to drive. So I flew to California, re-purchased the car at the same price, and drove it home to Wisconsin. I had it for about 2 years before a new and improved formula car reared its head, and the 356 moved on to a new owner.

Do I miss the Porsche?

Yes, and I still peruse the pages of Hemmings and the listings on Bring-A-Trailer to check for old 356s for sale, but I don’t miss the car enough to pay current prices. My old 356B traded hands three times in the ‘90s for $14,000, which I thought was a fair price at the time. The problem is, I still do.

Stuck in pre-inflationary time, you might say. The same is true of Series 1 E-type Jaguars. I owned and restored two of them when they were in the $20,000-$30,000 range, but I may have to wait for that Powerball win before I seriously go on the hunt for another one. In my IRA-funded retirement years, it’s the affordable classics that warm my heart.

Others I’ve sold and later bought back were old favorites that needed rescue from either neglect, high-mileage wear or having become a stalled restoration project in the back of someone’s garage. These include a 1981 BMW R100RS motorcycle, an early ‘70s Lola 204 Formula Ford with a bent frame and a 1960 Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite. Like my friend Richie Mayer, who calls himself “the patron saint of lost causes,” it breaks my heart to see nice old vehicles that need a little help to get back on the road. My wife Barbara has exactly the same problem with lost animals. She works at a no-kill cat shelter and a dog rescue organization. We have seven rescued animals as house pets. My workshop simply reflects a mechanical version of the same instinct.

Sometimes, however, no saintly altruism is involved at all. Sometimes we just want an old favorite back because it looks good, performs well or defines, in some subtle (or possibly ostentatious) way, who we are. Or at least who we imagine ourselves to be. In those cases, we look back on a vehicle we once owned and ask ourselves, What on earth was I thinking when I sold that thing?

It happened to me this summer. Last weekend, actually.

Barb and I drove to Road America for the motorcycle races and stayed with our friends Bill and Lauren in Elkhart Lake. (“Bill” incidentally, is William Hall, the Editor of this fine magazine.) Three years ago, I sold him my 2016 Triumph T-120 Bonneville to help fund the purchase of a new family car and soon began to regret my decision, wishing I’d simply taken out a larger car loan. I’ve owned Triumph Twins all my adult life and have almost never been without one. It didn’t seem right. I felt like Winston Churchill without a cigar. Also, I missed the bike’s smooth and deeply torquey 1200cc engine, and just its presence in the garage.

Luckily, Bill was kind enough to sell the Triumph back to me – with a right of first refusal guarantee – and I rode it home from the races while Barb followed in our car. The car, in this case, was our 2002 British Racing Green Jaguar XK8 convertible. The second one we’ve owned. Never should have sold the first one.

The reader may see a pattern here, and I have to admit to being a repeat offender with several favorite marques and models of cars and motorcycles, sequentially owning, at various times in life, two Triumph TR-3s, four Bugeye Sprites, three Lotus Sevens, four Norton Commandos, four Ducati 900 Super Sports, two MGBs, three Honda 400F Super Sports, three Suzuki DR650s, three Harley-Davidson Road Kings, two Harley-Davidson XLCR Café Racers and the two Jaguar E-types and XK8s already mentioned. And I’d be perfectly happy to have all or any of them back in my garage. Or at least one good example of each.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. A not-so-rare form of mental illness, perhaps? Einstein is supposed to have said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Fortunately for some of us, he didn’t say anything negative about doing the same thing over and over and looking forward to exactly the same result. Certain forms of satisfaction are timeless and bear repeating.