Rusty treasure in a barn: where and how retrocars are sometimes found

Behind this door is a million, and behind this is a pile of rusty iron. Don’t be confused!

We are sure that after reading this text you will still have the courage to open the grandfather’s shed, which has been bypassed for the last three decades. If you don’t find anything really remarkable there, then at least rejoice for the cars (and people) who are lucky. Standing forgotten in a dark dusty room for more than one year is a so–so vacation.

It is generally accepted that the older the car, the more valuable it is. Accordingly, to find somewhere in the backyard a car that has already taken root is like discovering a distant relationship with the Onassis family in the genealogical sheet. So, but not so: the laws of price formation for vintage cars work regardless of where a particular instance is found.

For example, in 2016, a Porsche 356A Speedster went under the hammer at an auction in South Carolina. This speedster was born on May 5, 1957 and became part of a party of 1171 of his fellows. In 1975, the then owner put it in the garage and completely forgot about the small sports car, which was found only 40 years later. And it was put up for auction exactly in the form in which it was found: the auctioneers did not even wipe the dust, believing that it only adds a kind of charm to the lot.

At the beginning of this decade, one such lover of antique iron paid at auction just over 400,000 euros for a Mercedes–Benz 300SL coupe that stood motionless in a garages in Greece for 37 years. And this is without the cost of restoration!

But these are still flowers. Just a year ago, a demolition garage in the South of the United States became the real holy grail for treasure hunters: two rusted diamonds were found there at once, put on the joke around 1991.

The approximate cost of the 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB / 2 and Shelby Cobra 427 roadsters of about the same age was estimated by experts at $ 4 million. Do you know a lot of modern supercars for similar money, even if they are used? Against this background, only one million for a twenty–year–old Aston Martin DB2 pre–production prototype looks like a trifle.