Market soars… market crashes

THE HEADLINE WRITERS just love that kind of phrase. Lump the values of everything together, from a Goggomobil to a McLaren F1, an Austin Seven to a Sierra Cosworth, and draw a definitive conclusion. Then sit back and watch your online pages explode with keyboard warriors telling you how wrong or right you are, or that their uncle once owned a Morris Ital, which he sold for a tidy profit.

The problem with those headlines is that they are just plain wrong. As I’ve written about in these pages before, the ‘market’ isn’t a singular thing, more a network of interlinked automotive ecosystems that operate almost entirely independently. Talking about what the market is doing is like saying that, this year, humans are eating more eggs. Some are, some aren’t. Some don’t even like eggs.

Here’s a great example: plot the average values of every car in the UK Hagerty Price Guide going back to 2015, and it looks like prices have been in a downward spiral since the peak in 2020. Other than a very brief dip in March 2022, the average value of £187,616 is the lowest it has been over the past nine years. Surely the bubble has burst?

Not really. As an example, I plotted another line: this time the mean values of every car in the Guide except the 16 cars of the Ferrari 250 family. This includes some of the most valuable production cars that Hagerty tracks, including the GTO, California and 250 LM. Suddenly, the chart looks very different: the new average of £120,667 is roughly where it was in June 2021 and within 10% of where it started in May 2015. The Covid boom is still visible, as are the peaks at the end of each year (probably reflecting higher prices paid at the autumn auctions, where higher-value UK cars tend to be sold) but it’s much flatter. And with only one model family removed.

I chose the Ferrari 250 family not only because they are expensive cars, but they prove a point. These are what Hagerty classes �