A Gearhead’s Trip Through A Vintage-Car Theme Park You can tell the weather is getting better because I’m spending more time in the SCM/ACC garage. It all started last week when seven-year-old Bradley asked if I would take him to school in the Viper. I asked why that car, and […]
Author: Keith Martin
Old Cars: More Reliable Now Than Ever
I was giving a talk at the local MG club meeting last Friday evening. We were discussing road trips, and the SCM “Road to Reno” adventure came up. In 2011, we bought three 1972-73 MGBs (two convertibles and a GT), refurbished them and drove to Reno for the All-MG Register […]
A Badass Volvo 1800S Joins the SCM Fleet
“It’s black, and it’s slammed.” That was my first thought when I set eyes on the ’64 Volvo 1800S. My daughter Alex and I had just arrived at iRoll Motors in San Martin, CA. I purchased the car in July, but it took this long for the shop to address a […]
400 Miles in a Porsche Turbo
Our 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo arrived a week ago, and as soon as I was able to wrestle it away from my 23-year-old daughter Alex, I started scouting out reasons to take a road trip. An email announcing “Deadly by Nature: Venom and Poison” caught my eye. It was […]
To Patagonia and Beyond In an E-type
We had just crested the 4,311-foot Cardenal Antonio Samoré Pass, crossing from Argentina into Chile. The 1969 Series 1.5 Jaguar XKE we were driving was performing brilliantly. It was a clear day, and we were surrounded by the snow-covered peaks of the Andes. This was the second day of the […]
Should Your Child Drive Your Collector Car?
Kids crash cars. They crash new cars and old cars. They will crash anything they drive. But how do we expect young kids to grow up with a love for our cranky old cars if we make them wait until they are 25 years old to drive them? By then, […]
The Arizona Whirlwind
Arizona in January is one of my busiest weeks of the year. The What’s My Car Worth? production crew shoots multiple episodes. I emcee the Arizona Concours d’Elegance. We put on Insider’s Seminars at Gooding & Company and Barrett-Jackson. We host a consignment tour at RM. And we run a week-long subscriptions […]
Scottsdale – Tales of a 540K, Corvette L88s and Frank Lloyd Wright
I’m sitting in Bruce Covill’s 1972 Ferrari 365 GTC/4. It’s my mobile office as I write this blog while on the Arizona Concours d’Elegance Tour. (Covill’s company Cyberitas Technologies, developed the mobile app for the concours, available here.) We’ve just finished a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. This […]
Barrett-Jackson is the Pebble Beach of Arizona
Our collector car world has four epicenters, and each has its own anchor event. The vintage car calendar starts with Monterey in August, followed by Arizona in January, Paris in February and Amelia Island in March. The signature event for the Monterey Classic Car Week is the Pebble Beach Concours […]
Two Collector Car New Year’s Resolutions
2014 is winding down, and it’s been quite a 12 months for SCM and me. On the magazine side, our page count is up significantly over 2013. We have more subscribers, more advertisers and higher newsstand sales. We’re distributing in bookstores in England, Australia and other countries for the first […]