Willson’s Smart Buys
Quentin on the Ferrari with room for price rises, AC Cobra continuations and the currently underrated Bristol 408 ‘Daytonas are a platinum-plated investment’ Looks like the Ferrari Daytona 365 GTB/4’s star is shining brightly – yet again. Was it really only seven years ago when coupés were £100k and even the ultra-rare Spyder was still firmly under the million? Well that’s all changed with the Berlinetta now moving towards £700k and Spyders chasing £3m. Chris Evans has just paid £2.7m for his concours Spyder and last year RM Auctions drew $3.3m for a similar car. RM’s February sale in Paris saw a 1969 Berlinetta with period racing mods hammered down at £542,000. Projects that need £200,000 restorations are routinely being offered at £400k and there’s a 1971 coupé that’s been in a Toronto underground garage for 25 years that’s expected to sell for $600k. Here we go again. The Daytona has always been one of the most telling barometers of the health of the old car market. Remember back in the late Eighties boom when they soared to £350k and then fell back when it all unravelled a few years later and flatlined at £75k? And back then we should have snapped them up because we all knew that this was the poster car of the Sixties baby-boomer generation and infinitely more iconic than the Countach and Testarossa. As well as racing success at Le Mans in 1971 and the Daytona 24 Hours in 1973 this was the 174mph road rocket of the seriously rich. As a small child in Paris in the Seventies on holiday with my parents I’d see Daytonas driven round the Peripherique by glamorous lotharios or hurtling down the autoroutes at impossible speeds. The last of Ferrari’s £500k £400k
Ferrari Daytona 365 GTB/4 Aftershocks followed postboom crash
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Small reset, then prices soared
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Daytona figures are telling barometer of overall market trends
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front-engined V12 warhorses, designer Leonardo Fioravanti penned that muscular shape in just a week and when road testers raved at its incredible top speed it became an instant legend. With 1406 built between 1968 and 1973 the Daytona isn’t the rarest of Ferraris but there were only 158 RHD coupés and 122 Spyders – just seven of which were right-hookers. Simply put, even at today’s big money any Daytona is a platinum-plated investment and it won’t be long before ‘ordinary’ Berlinettas touch £800k. And when that happens we’ll really know that the market is in rude health. ‘AC Cobra 427 continuations are the real deal’ With original Sixties 7.0-litre Cobras now sailing towards two million quid the 1991-on Shelby American and AC factory continuation cars are looking interesting. Forensically exact replicas with alloy bodies, they were built at the AC Cars factory in Surrey with COB chassis numbers (5001 to 5012 with a few gaps) or finished in the Shelby Las Vegas facility and fitted with CSX chassis numbers. Don’t confuse these with the raft of replicas with glassfibre bodies and smaller engines – the alloy-bodied 427cu in continuation cars are the real deal and as close as you’ll get to one of the fabled 348 built by AC and Shelby in the Sixties – the machine that was once the world’s fastest accelerating production car. Tom Hartley Jnr has just sold a 1991 AC Thames Ditton factory-built 427 MkIII with just 3000 miles for £249,000. That may sound on the high side for a turnkey copy but it’s one of only 10 built with a top-oiler
engine, perfectly accurate aluminium body and period stuff like drilled pedals, endurance racing fuel tank and Smiths gauges. When you look at the detailing of these continuation cars you realise that building one now would easily burn through £250k and it still wouldn’t have that important CSX or COB prefix stamped into the chassis plate or be listed on the official Shelby register. Auction results show a steady rising of values of continuation Cobras, with RM Auctions selling an ex-Carroll Shelby collection 289 in November 2014 for $225,000. And there have been other private sales recently that have changed hands for between $150k and $175k. Enthusiasts rightly realise that official copies like these make a good compromise when the originals are both impossibly expensive and getting too precious to drive in anger. That’s what this shift in perception is all about. A proper continuation 427 is actually a tighter drive than the real thing with discreet engineering improvements that make it steer, ride, stop and handle better. As long as real Cobras (even 289s are £700k now) carry on rising they’ll pull these faithful facsimiles up in their wake. If it says AC in the V5C, has a CSX or COB chassis number, an alloy body, was built by Shelby or AC with that Ford 427 big block, it’s the next best thing to a period 7.0-litre. And setting the rear rubber alight in a continuation Cobra feels a lot less reckless than doing it in the real thing. And if you’ve ever driven an original 427 you’ll know the experience will be much less scary too – the 7.0-litre Cobra didn’t have a reputation as a killer car for nothing.