I very, very nearly bought a Citroen SM on Bring-a-Trailer last week. This car had sold there once already this year in March, with the new owner reselling now due to a recent back operation which made the car uncomfortable for him to drive. Hmmmm, maybe. Given that the SM was developed by Citroen in the 70’s with its recently-acquired subsidiary, Maserati, these are complicated and finicky cars to say the very least. The only people who’ll tell you with a straight face that an SM can be a durable, reliable car assuming you have the right mechanic and drive the car regularly as SM’s don’t like to sit, is someone who is so upside-down in theirs financially that they must say these words to themselves each night in order to sleep soundly. Or perhaps someone whose only had the car for a few weeks like this gent selling his SM. I didn’t buy the car, someone else did at $64,000 which is 4k more than the car fetched in March. So, I’m certainly not the only one clicking at Bring a Trailer more than usual thanks to Covid.
A Lava Orange Porsche 911 GT3 Touring found its way to by inbox, and I clicked the link so many times that the selling agent’s clever website grabbed my IP address and emailed to enquire whether, given I’d looked at the listing 53 times over the past four days, I might be interested in placing an offer? I am nuts about Porsche’s Lava Orange color and, I did very well a few years ago with a 981 Boxter Spyder – a quasi-limited GT-Series car like the GT3 Touring – so I figured perhaps in these strange days the seller might take a lowish offer. Not only did the seller not accept the offer, they countered at the existing asking price and then, a week later, raised the online offering price by 5k! It’s been sitting there for a month, unsold.
As I’ve written here before, last year I bought a Lancia Delta Integrale and, I have to admit, with some mechanical and electronic foibles to sort out – due to its being a 25-year old Italian car that’s not be driven much for the past 5 years – it was a frustrating teething process but I am now fully and truly in love. It’s completely different from anything else I’ve ever owned or driven, from the upright, straight back and chest-out driving position to the Fisher-Price interior dials and overall toy-like scale, but like every great driver’s car, once you know it well, and trust it as an extension of yourself as you move quickly down the right road, everything else just disappears. No stress, no Covid, no fears for yet another loved one facing a battle with cancer, just me, the feel of the road, the wind whistling through the open windows, the sun and a happy grin beaming across my face.
The new Ferrari Roma has piqued my curiosity not just because I work with Ferrari but rather because I find its design unusual and intriguing. I think design that takes some getting used to – rather than a design which is immediately embraced, safe or relatable to similar things you’ve already seen – tends to make the greatest, most lasting impact, and is exceedingly rare these days. The Roma has been compared by some who’ve seen the car in photos but not in person – I spent last week with the Roma, chaperoning it through photoshoots in Califronia – to an Aston Martin, or the Jaguar F-Type, and I can assure you that upon actually seeing the Roma, those comparisons will evaporate. To me it feels very 70’s Pininfarina, expecially through the nose, as does the surfacing, and while the Roma’s rear deck is taller, I get a 365 GTB/4 Daytona vibe: and I think that car’s departure from Ferrari’s styling language at the time is an apt comparison to the Roma which does the same today. The car feels modern, and true to avant garde cars like the Daytona, it’s an expression of how Ferrari defines itself to the world, unbowed by how the world may define Ferrari. Brava!
