Can I Interest You in A Foreign Investment Opportunity?

My friend Connor and I are cut from the same weird, cheap, and often French cloth. (Regular readers of this column may remember him from Against All Oddities adventures as the Renault Rescue.) We met first over Peugeots—he had a 604 and I had a 405. Conner bought my Daihatsu Charade and kept my Ami mostly safe while I was in Germany. We are part of a group text chat, populated with a handful of other automotive dirtbags, that brings nothing but trouble.

Our latest endeavor: We have formed an investment conglomerate. Our business model? Listen up, Sharks. Here’s our pitch:

About a week ago, Connor sent me a listing he knew would be delectable kryptonite: an exceedingly rare French car, at a low price, in a far-off location. When people hear “beautiful and rare car” they think it will cost megabucks, which is, in this case, patently untrue. Between you and me, the values of neglected Gallic trashboxes are creeping up around here but not yet too far out of my humble reach.

Alright, no more delay: What is it and why would I want such a thing?

The car in question is a ’66 Simca 1000S Bertone Coupe, listed at a farm auction in Nebraska. The Simca Bertone Coupe was exceptionally beautiful, slow, and rare (in that order). Based on a budget-friendly three-box, rear-engined Mille sedan, the coupe was a mildly quicker yet infinitely sexier, special-bodied version that was nevertheless available at your local Chrysler dealer. And, of course, nostalgia has value—it had been over a decade since I daily drove a Simca!

Neither Connor nor I could possibly accommodate another whole car in our lives… but halves? We could manage that. We decided to invest equally in this disintegrating promising asset. We agreed that Connor would handle all manner of deal brokering and negotiations, whether that being flying to Nebraska for financial discussions or waiting for said farm auction site, seemingly designed to run on Netscape Navigator, to reload and register his bid during a work meeting. Connor’s strengths include logistical acumen and the ability to facilitate transportation, be it by sea, air, or by lowballing some energy drink addict to tow the thing for a sum of under-the-table cash.

My contributions would include a 50 percent financial stake, paid incrementally in small PayPal deposits whenever financially feasible. Additionally, I would be in charge of all governmental and regulatory aspects of the deal (waiting in line at the DMV, for instance). Furthermore, I could offer secure storage of said asset and added value via maintenance USPs—replacing fuel lines and stuff.

Together, Sharks, our Multi-State Conglomerate will merge our commercial and technical skills to maximize our KPIs: obscurity, beauty, and impossibility of locating spare parts. Once relocated to an area with a higher density of Simca connoisseurs and brought to a running condition, we could stand to make literally dozens of dollars.

End of pitch.

We won the auction with a $1001 bid.

Connor hopped to it with the shipping and payment planning, while I calculated the potential savings of eating nothing but fresh eggs and items from my spring garden for the next two months. I paid him as I could and noodled about where to store the thing. I determined the best place for it was next to my other French asset (in similar bad condition and blue-ish color), in my recently acquired ex-foundry storage facility.

The auction fees were paid ($1100), a shipper was booked, and now all we could do was wait for the car to arrive in Statesville. The interlude was fortunately brief—just a few short days later, I got a call informing me that the car would arrive… now-ish. I headed down to the foundry expecting to see a hot-shot rig full of luxury cars, with the diminutive Simca hanging off the end. Instead, an F-150 with Texas plates and a beat-all-to-hell 18-foot dovetail trailer with New York plates had ridden all the way from the Lone Star State, to Nebraska, and finally to North Carolina with only the Bertone coupe on board.

I crunched some numbers and couldn’t rationalize such a low shipping bill for this type of service. But alas, it wasn’t my job to understand. The nice man, who hailed from Tbilisi, reversed painlessly into the compound and helped me shove the Simca into a bay. As we rolled towards the Moskvich 407 sedan, he shrieked “Moskvitchka!” surely having seen many growing up in the former Soviet republic. I aired up his ailing trailer tires and off he went, leaving me with the little blue French car and the hope that he remembered to factor in a profit margin on his bid.

Buying any car sight unseen obviously carries risk. Buying 40-year dormant, special-bodied French cars constructed of unobtainable parts and made from low-quality steel? Welcome to the summit of the risk pyramid.

I FaceTimed Connor to include him as I poked around the car for the first time. To our conglomerate’s unbelievable shock, the car was exactly as advertised. We had known about a rotten driver’s side floor from the auction photos, but closer inspection revealed no rot around any seams. That’ll be easy to patch.

My wife, Dana, found the owner’s manual detailing the many delicate switches and their intricacies. The temptation to try them all was simply too high for me to resist. I grabbed my great Balkan Wohnmobil battery and hooked it up with some jumper cables. When no smoke billowed from behind the dash, I determined that the 1000’s first test had been passed. While Dana read aloud each knob’s function, I attempted its function, with Connor observing via video chat. Now that the lights and wipers seemed to work at least somewhat, why not see how the starter motor responds to some voltage?

The engine rolled over by hand, which, given the car was last plated in 1982, I didn’t really expect. Despite the great results on the grab-the-fanbelt-and-pull test, the starter still refused to move the engine. I suspect bad hot and ground connections throughout the starting circuit.

So, now what? Well, as a good first step, the Nebraska title arrived in the mail to Connor, so we’re officially owners of a—let me double check what it says on the paper—”Beretone.” Does a full restoration make sense? Not for this venture. The idea is to get it back on the road for as little financial investment as possible. Given our dreams of wheezing down the Charleston battery with the windows down for not much more than a couple grand, the ROI will be tough to match.