AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — In keeping with tradition, the Amelia Concours classic car show picked, what else, a sports car with racing heritage as its best in show.
The 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B, a car considered the best sports car of its day with a chassis derived from motorsport, took top honors. (The Amelia historically tends to focus on sports and racing cars.)
Classic car insurer Hagerty (HGTY), which has been running the Amelia for four years now, noted that getting your hands on the ultra-rare 8C 2900 will set you back a sizable amount — perhaps as much as $20 million.
But that’s life — and a familiar price point — at the Amelia.
McKeel Hagerty, president and CEO of Hagerty, believes the Amelia is becoming something of a Pebble Beach for the Eastern US, where ultra-rare cars are winning prizes and coming up for auction.
“If there’s one event like this, you know, with Pebble Beach in the summer, we think there’s a place for Amelia to be here [in the spring], sort of permanently in people’s minds,” Hagerty said in a roundtable interview. “I think we proved that there’s still really this room for a classic car display and not just keep this inevitable drift towards newer and newer cars.”
The drift to newer and newer cars can be seen in auction results, especially this spring.
The preliminary totals for the spring season — which includes RM Sotheby’s last week and Gooding & Company and Hagerty’s own Broad Arrow this weekend — hit $190.3 million across the three auctions, up from $183.8 million a year ago. But the cars that have traditionally brought in the big bucks, like the Amelia-winning Alfa and other highly prized Ferraris, are seeing softness in the market.
In their place, Porsche sports cars from the 70s and up, newer Mercedes AMG vehicles, and even Japanese sports cars from the 80s and 90s are seeing higher sales.
For Hagerty, this transition in the classic car market is an opportunity.
That’s because the company’s insurance business has all the data from writing policies for classic cars, as well as from its relatively new auction business acquisition. That can help clients transition out of cars that may not be getting traditional values these days to other more desirable autos.
Hagerty can also use that data for newer collectors looking to get into the classic car game.
“What is the intellectual high ground in your industry? Who has it? When you think, you think Bloomberg, right [in finance]? They own the data for people who are professional traders with the Bloomberg terminals. It’s a data company underneath the media side,” he said.
Story Continues
