You’re slow, old man: Missing out on cool cars and good deals

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about reading Dick O’Kane’s classic book How To Repair Your Foreign Car while I was sitting in a hospital waiting room. What I didn’t say was that I was there because my wife was having cardiac surgery. She’s now home and doing fine, but in both the lead up to the surgery as well as during her recovery, it’s no surprise that my priorities were, uh, re-prioritized. I did virtually zero work on cars, and obviously I didn’t run out the door on the usual oh-my-Lord-I-need-to-drop-everything-and-buy-this-car-RIGHT-NOW or it’s-probably-nothing-but-you-never-know-unless-you-look reconnaissance exercises on potential new additions to my not-quite-a-car-collection (or, as I call them, “content generators”).

However, that’s not to say that I didn’t continue to look. Old habits—like coming downstairs in the morning, pouring a cup of coffee, and searching, as well as giving it one last look at night in bed while my wife is asleep—are hard to break. Plus, in trying times like this, old habits function as absolutely essential stress-busting diversions and little slices of normality.

But I have to say that looking without the realistic possibility of being able to pull the trigger on anything became challenging when actual cars of interest came on the radar. (I’m far too risk-averse to click-and-buy something on Hagerty Marketplace or eBay or BaT; I almost always buy locally where I can see the car with my own eyes, meet the owner, size up the car and owner, and drag the car home.) I’ll walk through them below—in order of price, since, as you know, I’m an inveterate bottom feeder, and thus it’s the cheaper cars that I was most likely to have actually done something about.

(I doubt I need to say this, but just to be clear: I adore my wife more than anything in this world, and any jokes I make below about running out on her during recovery from cardiac surgery to look at a car are just that—jokes. I hung with her constantly during the week before the surgery, was there during all visiting hours the week she was in the hospital, and was her caregiver the first week of at-home recovery. The was zero chance of me running out on her to look at a car, or me even being preoccupied by something I saw online when she needed me. What I’m really talking about here are the periods before it all hit the fan and after she’d recovered enough that a semblance of normality returned to the house. Even if I hamstrung myself by saying I wasn’t going to click-and-buy and commit to any sight-unseen purchase, and even if I couldn’t go see a car in person at the time, in theory there were still options—such as a trying to negotiate a sight-unseen electronic deposit to hold a car for a week or two, or convincing someone that you’re serious enough that if they bring the car to you, you’ll likely buy it. So, when I joke in the headline “You’re slow, old man,” what I’m really saying is that the circumstances were still too extraordinary for me to feel right about acting on something, and the cars weren’t extraordinary enough for me to want to.)

#1: 2009 BMW 128i 6-Speed ($3300)

The lines of BMW’s E82 1 Series two-door coupe (the 128i and 135i) never did anything for me, but it is one of BMW’s last small rear-wheel drive platforms, and as someone who will go to his grave believing that front-wheel drive and all-wheel drive simply feel wrong, it did hold some academic interest to me. A few years ago, I helped a friend in Virginia buy a 128i that showed up on Facebook Marketplace (FBM) here in Boston, and I was surprised by how much I liked it, so occasionally I search for stick E82s. This one showed up on FBM with 113,000 miles and a price so attractive that I thought even-odds that it was a scam. It didn’t matter, because by the end of the day its status was changed to “sold.”

#2: 2006 BMW 3 Series 6-Speed Wagon ($3800)

I daily-drove BMW wagons for a decade. I get away with my current daily—a 2003 530i sedan—because it has fold-down rear seats that allow me enough of the utility of a wagon to fake it (e.g., it can fit a set of wheels and tires), but I search regularly for an E91 3 Series wagon. Most of the ones out there are automatics with all-wheel drive. Stick E91s are rare, rear-wheel-drive wagons are rarer, rear-wheel-drive stick wagons are unicorn-rare, and rear-wheel-drive stick sport-package wagons only exist if someone ordered them that way. So the ad titled “2006 BMW 3 Series 6-Speed Wagon” that appeared to show a sport package interior with beautiful dark-brown, deeply-bolstered seats certainly piqued my interest, even with the reported 180,000 miles.

I messaged the seller, asking if the car was rear-wheel or all-wheel drive, and I asked him to send me the VIN so I could run it through a decoder site and verify the option package. He responded, “This was all-wheel drive but now 2-wheel drive.” It’s not uncommon for owners to disable the front drive on AWD BMWs by unplugging an electrical connector when the plastic gear on the transfer case actuator fails, but his answer wasn’t the one I was hoping for. And he didn’t send the VIN. As much as I swooned over the dark brown interior and the sport seats, a closer look at the photos showed that that “M” on the steering wheel is way bigger than it should be, the wheel’s two-tone leather was someone’s personal installation and not a factory option, and there were a number of odd gauges stuck onto the dash, as well as boy-racer-style aluminum pedals and dead pedal. So, in order to know what it was, I’d need to go see it, and that wasn’t going to happen. It was gone the next day.

#3: 1962 Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk 4-Speed ($7500)

I’ll admit that this one’s a bit of a stretch, as it’s a car that I literally had on my FBM “saved” list for nearly a year. But still, I’m sure I’m not the only one who saves listings for things like this, and when they sell, thinks “Damn, I would’ve bought that!”

While the Studebaker-related ventricle in my heart really belongs to an Avanti, this ’62 Gran Turismo Hawk had serious mojo. From the four-on-the-floor stick to the slit-like tailpipes of the twin exhausts, to the factory Studebaker floor mats with the diamond motif that would’ve looked at home in the original Sands hotel and casino, I thought it just exuded cool. Unfortunately, it didn’t have factory air, so it didn’t exude cold. Still, even after saving the listing for a year without taking action, when you see that red “Pending” label show up, you know it’s game over, and that’s sad.

#4: 1968 Triumph GT6 Mk1 ($12,000)

As I wrote about here, the 1970 GT6+ I owned after I graduated high school was, by far, the worst car I’ve ever owned (it was the car that taught me that everything bad I’d ever heard about British cars was, in fact, true), but it was also quick and beautifully proportioned. The word got out years ago that these look a bit like a 3/4-sized E-Type Jaguar and cost a small fraction of the price, so the days of solid cheap ones are long gone. Having a solid largely-original first-generation GT6 show up just 40 miles from me made me start to think things that just weren’t right. Of course, I do have my limits. I would’ve loved to bring the car home to my driveway, but twelve grand wasn’t anywhere near cheap enough to make me run out on my recuperating wife while I yelled upstairs to my kids, “Watch your mother and make sure she doesn’t bleed out on the couch.”

#5: 1973 Corvette 4-Speed ($17,500)

During the pandemic, I wrote about being seduced by a C3 Corvette, a bronze ’73 that had brown stripes down the center and along the sugar-scoop rear window buttresses, a brown-painted tail, and curved brown accent stripes over its hips and shoulders that evoked images of an illicit romance with an overly-made-up woman from the wrong side of the tracks. It was a sea-change moment for me, as C3s never really blew my skirt up, but I suddenly developed an appreciation for that Coke-bottle-shaped body. Ever since, I’ve kept my eye open for another C3 that might light my fire in the same way. In my humble opinion, ’73 is the inflection point on the C3 cost/value curve. That is, the earlier C3s have the thin chrome bumpers on both the front and rear, but the ’73s tend to be less expensive because they still have the rear bumper but not the front (the bumper was made integral with the nose). This was a one-year configuration; in ’74, the chrome rear bumper was deleted and the cute upturned rear end was changed to a slant-back design with an integrated bumper.

This 65,000-mile car was just north of NYC. The combination of the blue paint, the double white stripe down the center, the black interior, and the four-speed made it the first C3 that came remotely close to triggering the pleasure centers that that bronze-and-brown-striped car did. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was smitten, because after the seller dropped the price from $29,500 to $17,500, the car was gone in a week.

#6: Mystery Car

A few days ago, a car I’ve lusted after showed up on FBM for an attractive price. The ad had only been up for 34 minutes when I stumbled across it in my evening search, giving me that buyer’s adrenaline rush that I might actually be the first to respond. The seller isn’t in Boston, but he’s within a day’s drive there and back. I looked at the ad, thought about the situation, decided “Well, there’s no way I can actually act on this,” and went to bed, assuming that it would be gone in the morning. Surprisingly, the ad was still there. That day, I couldn’t put it out of my mind, so that evening I pulsed the seller, told him my situation, said “All’s fair in love and classic cars; I’m sure it’ll be gone by the time I can get serious, but let’s hold onto each other’s contact info.” I’ve since talked with the seller on the phone. As my wife’s recovery continues—and as two of our adult sons live with us—the possibility of my going to see it becomes less and less out of the question.

We shall soon see whether or not this old man really is too slow.

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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