Lateral-g Forums - Velocity at Barrett Jackson

I have been doing Barrett Jackson for over 20 years and a booth for 10 years now so I see it all. What most of you don’t get is if there is only one bidder the car will go cheap it takes multiple guys to bid to drive the price up. Like Bret said to me at the show he knew he had his car sold but had no idea of how high it would go because he was not sure how many people were after it. I think Bret did very well with the sale of this car because he got all the advertising dollars out of the car he could.

Greg has some great points but BJ should back the cars he sells, they sell all kinds of stuff like the corvette Greg mentioned without knowing crap about the car so these guys that don’t have a clue bid on something that is just nice but has no real value to it. Maybe to one of us it does because I don’t care about numbers I care about drivability, the cool factor and how well it was built.

Now I cut up matching number cars all the time ( I know I know but I do what I am paid to do) and everyone has sold for twice what they could have gotten as a matching number car but they have lots of time and money into these cars. To me a car that is a great street driver and built well is well worth the money because a stock numbers matching car is only worth going to a museum or your garage you can’t drive it or its worth nothing. The higher the miles the less its worth. Another factor to look at is the Charity cars, they will always do well because you have guys there with tons and tons of money that like to give for tax breaks. You would like to think it’s for the Charity but in most cases it’s because they want to be on TV and can use a huge break. One Corvette went over the block I think three times because the buyer donated it back so they could get more money for Craig’s Charity. All and all that was a very cool thing the guys did as they raised a lot of money.

Numbers are numbers at BJ and they push cars over other cars to boost the numbers it’s all about who and what you know there to get the good times as Greg said. You could have a $500,000 car and if it goes on a Wednesday or Thursday it will pull half of what a Friday or Saturday would do. That’s just the way the show goes and why most of us don’t want to put a car up there and risk it. I know a ton of guys that brought out 10-20 cars to sell and they were all over the place with numbers some OK and some great but they were stressed to the hills all week waiting to see what they would get. To some it’s just fun and they want to be on TV or they have more money than brains. Either way if you have never been you should go to one of them for a day and just watch the auction it’s a great time.