Chris Adamson reports from the South Western Vehicle Auctions classic sale held on Friday, 31st January…
(All words and photographs by Chris).
The classic car market has started 2020 on a soft note if the results from the first quarterly auction at South Western Vehicle Auctions in Poole are any indication.
While 95 per cent of the lots found buyers most were close to their reserves and a number of big ticket items failed to get anywhere near their estimates and remained unsold.
Feature lot, a Bentley Special, one of 16 built in the early 70s by Halse Engineering in East Sussex, only attracted a couple of bidders and the top offer of £32,500 was well short of the £50,000 pre-sale estimate.
It was a similar case for a pretty 1930 MG M Type Midget that was previously displayed in a Belgian museum. It only got to £11,250 before bidding stopped, which was someway shy of the £18,500 asking price.
Elsewhere a gargantuan 1938 Cadillac Lasalle 50 Series from Beverley Hills struggled to £18,000 before interest ended against a hoped for £29,000.
Top price ended up as the £24,840 (with costs – £4,000 above reserve) paid for a well presented 1937 Rolls-Royce 25/30 Limousine (photograph below) which has benefitted from a two year restoration at the beginning of the century.
It was some way ahead of the £14,040 paid for a 1978 Jaguar 2.4, a 1969 Mini Cooper (£13,500), Jaguar XK8 from 1998 (£13,623) and a similar aged TVR Chimaera (£12,312).
One of the biggest improvements on estimate was a 1971 MGBGT in Blaze Orange that came with an extensive history file and saw the bidding quickly rise from the £3,000 reserve to finish at a very healthy £7,020.
Other big movers included a 1964 Rover 110 that dropped the hammer for a take-home price of £6,210 – well above the catalogue estimate of £2,500, a 1958 Wolseley 1500 going for £6,480 against a predicted £2,900 and an unfashionable Fern Green 1970 Ford Cortina 1600E (pictured in Chris’s heading photograph) that quickly made £11,556, nearly double its reserve. Proving that early Land Rovers are still experiencing a revival, a non-running low-mileage Series 2 in a sorry state from 1962 with no reserve attracted some fierce bidding and eventually cots its new owner £6,080 and a long restoration project ahead.
Bread and butter entries included a 1955 Austin A30 (£1,150 against no reserve), an early 1956 split-screen Morris Minor (£2,484), a 1953 MG YB Saloon in need of a lot of TLC (£5,832), Rover 80 from 1960 (£3,564), a 1946 Austin 8 (£4,428), a 1964 Triumph Vitesse (£7,128), a 1962 Morris Minor Traveller (£8,262), a 1960 Austin A40 (£6,048) and a 1974 Triumph Stag Auto (£10,530).
Among the more unusual items was a 1927 Chevrolet Capitol fitted with a 1600c Pinto engine that surprised many by making £5,940, a 1988 Chevrolet GMC Corvette (photograph below) that made £8,640 and a 1986 Daimler Limousine with no history that crawled up to £2,160 (photograph below).