Now, where was I? Since I sold my 550 some four and a half years ago I have had a number of alternative modes of transport.
I had a couple of Aston Martins; a DB7 I kept for almost 10 years finally left in April 2010. That car definitely served me well. Then the 1989 Vantage Volante pictured somewhere in the start of this thread. Not one of those mass produced affairs, a proper 1989 one. It was a very cool car, but frankly a bit of a barge to drive. So I sold that too. It did have the advantage of selling for a bit more than I bought it for, but not enough to merit the word investment. Then I thought about buying a 512BB, but even with a good deal on the table my heart wasn’t in it. Dinos ran away into the fairy land of £150-200k, which is just silly, whatever anyone says. So I sat browsing the internet looking at various connotations that could satisfy my need to drive a car that was fun.
We went through some Porsches too. Initially a Boxster S followed by the full fat 997 C4S cabriolet. I must confess that these weren’t actually mine, they belonged to my other and better half whose entire car history went; Mazda MX3, Mazda MX5, Porsche Boxter S, Porsche 911 C4S Cabriolet in about 3 years flat. She put an end to that progression by comprehensively writing off the 911. It aquaplaned off the road at 70mph (+/- 10% officer) and she managed to make it look more like a 50p piece than a 911 by smashing every corner of the car. Fortunately she walked away with nothing more than a seat belt bruise and a decidedly poor opinion of super cars. Discretion, and sorely bruised confidence, suggested to her that replacing like-for-like was not the way to go, so we went back to the MX5.
Two dogs also arrived somewhere in the process necessitating a family car. Now, you’ll find all sorts of daily driver stories on the internet. You know the sort of thing; “I use my Countach every day and it’s never missed a beat. I have it serviced by a man in a shed near Shrewsbury who used to be Ferruccio Lamborghini’s personal mechanic. It costs me a bag of pork scratchings and a pickled egg a year. I don’t understand why anybody buys any other car” or some such nonsense. Well the reason why adults have four seat cars is because they actually have sex with another person. This leads to babies and they get a might pissed off if you put them in the boot, even if the boot is big enough for a week’s shopping of ready meals, lads mags and a crate of Barcardi breezers.
The fertile ones amongst us who actually have relationships with real people who are not on the internet (ironic I know given where this going) buy;
Audis if we are unassuming and tasteful, or
BMWs if we are in a company car scheme, or
Mercedes if we are very old or
Range Rovers if we want to look over people’s fences and don’t care if everybody hates us.
I actually attempted to be ostentatiously unassuming by having a bright blue Audi S4; it’s a really good car, one of the best I have had if you ignore the understeer and occasionally pissed gear box. It’s got one of those dual clutch things that apparently do something clever. Usually it’s brilliant, but just occasionally it goes all Oliver Reed on you and can’t decide which way is up and which way down. It then flounders about trying to regain its composure whilst you sit wondering why it’s gone to sleep on you. Of course being a piece of German engineering it rapidly recovers its poise before over reacting. You go from being befuddled by the fact it won’t accelerate to shock and bemusement as it takes off like only a four wheel drive supercharged 3.0 V6 can; i.e. briskly and with misplaced sure footedness. This car was supposed to be a bridge between “fun” cars and “sensible” cars, although I have got a deposit on a new RS4 and still sometimes think a C63 V8 AMG might make some kind of statement, though quite what I don’t know.
So, to summarise, in less than a year we’d gone from two Aston Martins, a 911 and an Audi S4 to move the dogs about, to an Audi and an MX5. We had more money, but with the mornings getting lighter the desire to get up and go for a drive starts to nag at you.
The great thing about only really liking two brands of sports car (Aston and Ferrari) is it makes choices much easier, especially as both marques have made some pretty mediocre fayre recently and new ones are priced aspirationally. If you look through Glasses Guide, you can find which cars depreciate fastest, either in relative terms or absolute terms. I always find the relative numbers somewhat superfluous. I would like to have back the £80k that my DB7 cost me in ten years depreciation more than the 50% the S4 has depreciated in 2 years, because you can buy more stuff with the bigger amount of money. It turns out that Ferraris and Astons are in the top ten fastest depreciating cars in absolute terms. If you really wanted to hose money up the wall a Bugatti Veyron or any Maybach were the things to have. So this is why I don’t buy new, or even nearly new supercars – although I do quite like the Ferrari California – but that’s just because I am in touch with my feminine side.
So you just flick back through time;
430: Great car, handles beautifully but that bloody exhaust is so childish. I am now closer to 50 than 40 and I have gone well past the point where I want people to look at me just because I have a car. I really don’t care and would pay to have the thing shut up and act like a grown up. Make the noise if it’s necessary, but don’t do it to shout “look at me! I have some money and I have bought a car!” and while we are on the subject, in the name of God don’t do it to a Vauxhall Corsa or a Subaru Imprezza. Yesterday morning I sat behind a Ford Fiesta with an exhaust so big that you could smuggle illegal immigrants in it. The car had a sticker in its inevitably blacked out back window, that said “I am Sorry Officer, I thought you wanted a race”. So what is going through the mind of this noise pollutant when he is souping up his car? “Let’s put a big noisy exhaust on it to attract attention and illegal number plates and windows to make sure that after I have annoyed all my neighbours the police have a good reason to stop me. Oh and I know, I’ll put a sticker on it that simultaneously suggests an intent to break the law and patronises the police”. Guess what the likely outcome will be you putrescent pool of puss filled acne? Yes, you’ll infuriate old farts like me and also get stopped all the time, combining the heady cocktail of inconveniencing your fellow citizens and simultaneously inconveniencing yourself, you blithering idiot.
At least Ferrari 430 owners didn’t have to go out of their way to modify their cars to make them bloody annoying. Ferrari did it for them as standard.
The 360 is beginning to feel like the 348 de nos jours. I really thought long and hard about the 360. I have driven a few and they are very good, lighter and more powerful than a 355. But when I see one, I do think, “there’s a chap who wants a 430, but can’t afford one”. It’s like buying a 308 instead of a 328, or to a lesser extent a 550 instead of a 575 (I would say that!). They are the same cars in most respects (don’t believe all that “no parts are common” hogwash, the design is what defines a car, not the parts catalogue) so buy the later, more powerful one. I also have the unusual consideration that my garage doors are not designed with the modern Ferrari in mind, so a 360 could just be too damned fat for me.
So you get to the 355, a car that I have looked at every year since the turn of the century. What has stopped me buying one? Well firstly I am fickle. I fancied a TDF blue one with cream, or maybe argento and black or maybe even burgundy. Certainly not red and certainly no shields (only race cars have shields). I prefer manual gearboxes because the early F1 gearbox was a bit bumpy for me. Some fresh air is always nice, even if it does bugger up the handling of the car and, most important of all, not extortionately priced. Yes buy the best you can afford, but remember it is only a car and you should allocate a sensible proportion of your wealth and income to a car.
Price is an emotive issue. Over the years I have been buying and driving relatively costly cars, I have listened to God only knows how many people tell me what a great investment a particular car is. The fundamental truth is the fact that new and nearly new cars are almost always NOT investments. Indeed a little simple arithmetic will show that any car valued under about £200k is unlikely to be a good investment.
Think about a £50k car. How much does it cost to insure? Let’s be generous and assume we are all old farts with lots of no claims who don’t speed. Insurance is then relatively cheap, so let’s say £500. Then a car needs a good regular service to preserve value. Again let’s play on the low side and say an average of £1500 per annum (allowing for wear and tear and tyres etc). Low mileage is good, but storage is bad, so say 2000 miles a year at 20 miles to the gallon (we are trying to err on the side of prudence here), so 100 gallons or 455 litres of fuel at £1.20 a litre (I know, but I really am trying to be prudent here) is about £550.
So the negative yield on your £50k investment is:
Insurance: £500
Servicing: £1,000
Fuel: £550
Total: £2,050
In simple terms the negative yield is over 5%. So if your car doesn’t increase in value by more than 5.0% per year, it is not an investment, it is a shrinking asset, which, incidentally, is why you don’t pay capital gains on profits on old cars; there’s no tax on the sale of shrinking assets. So if you add inflation to the negative yield you need to grow the value at maybe 7-8% per annum, in every year, just to recover the costs and inflation. It doesn’t sound much, but when you compound it over, say, 5 years you need to see the value of your asset grow by 40-46% just to recover the costs of ownership.
If we do the same calculation for a £500k car, the costs do not rise by a factor of ten; in fact some don’t rise at all. The higher the value, the less important is mileage for example. Insurance is more expensive, as is servicing, but maybe by a factor of 100%. Again to be prudent let’s say costs are three times as high and the same fuel is used. The negative yield is £6-7k per year, or under 1.5%. To beat inflation you only need growth of maybe 3.5%-4.5%. As the cost gets higher the effect gets stronger. In summary you can only make a real return from the most expensive cars, and the Ferrari 355 is not, and in my life time never will be, one of them.
So I was looking out for a car that had done a few miles, been looked after properly and wouldn’t break the bank. I described before the process of scouring the market, sifting the data and getting all the priority items sorted when negotiating. Suffice to say that this time I was looking at the web a couple of times a week and kept thinking; “prices are creeping up, but cars aren’t moving. Its mid-winter, in a recession, maybe now’s the time to see if there’s a car out there”
Then an opportunity appeared. Right spec, a dealer I knew of who had been around for many years, a few miles on the clock but only three owners and a reasonable price; overall worth a journey to go and look. So I called up, made an appointment and trundled down to see. Looking back I can see that there were things that I would compromise on; I did go to look at a red/ crème 355 GTS, but immediately knew I didn’t want it. My two no compromise areas were price and the reputation of the dealer. If you sell anything for 20 years you should have the reputation you deserve. The internet is full of praise for willing new boys who flash like comets to financial ruin. It’s the solid plodders who attract regular gentle references year after year I look to.
Reputation is like the story of the American who went to Wimbledon and asked the head groundsman how he got the centre court to be so consistent. “Oh it’s not difficult, sir. What you do is use the right base layer; we use sand and gravel, to get the drainage right. Then use a top soil that encourages root growth in the grass to stop the surface breaking up. Finally the most important thing is to roll it with medium sized, metal roller one a week for around a century or so”. It takes time to build a reputation.
Anyway, I called ahead, drove down, had a short test drive and read the history file from cover to cover. It had all the things you want to see; It had had the manifold replaced and been properly serviced by people I’d heard of. There were problems in the distant past with a cooling fan, sorted under a Ferrari warranty. The roof mechanism worked in that astonishingly contrived way that 355s do.
The interior was showing all the issues that 355s have. The interior trim is made of a sort of latex rubber material and much as if your wife or girlfriend were to be clad in latex, when new it was tactile and beguiling. After 10-15 years however the effect wears off and you are left with a slightly perished, vaguely sticky material that is significantly less alluring. It is fixable either by throwing money at it and buying original parts, or by various “upgrades” and bodges that are described in elaborate detail elsewhere. My solution, look the other way and sort it out later.
The final touch was the registration. Each of my Ferraris has had its own “Ferrari” registration; the 328GTS was F328xxx, the 550 was F550xxx and at no cost to me the 355 is F355xxx. It sort of felt right, so I wrote a cheque, and drove off homewards, a Ferrari owner for the third time. Who would have thought that when I was playing Top Trumps in the playground in Birmingham?
