The 23rd running of Techno Classica Essen will be held in the German city from March 30 to April 3, with strong support again from the country’s major car makers and an anticipated 170,000 visitors.

Among more than 1100 exhibitors showing 2500 cars, Mercedes will mark 125 years of the car – 1886 being the year a patent was awarded to the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. BMW will be celebrating 75 years of the 328 sports car and 50 years of the Neue Klasse saloon, while it and arch-rival Audi will commemorate their involvement in motor sport – BMW in touring cars and Audi

with three pairs of road and race cars, including NSUs. VW will lift the roof on its classic cabriolets.

Classic Cars magazine will be on stand GA-319 in the Galleria and show visitors can subscribe for 12 months for just €50 – a saving of more than 50 per cent on the usual rate. For show details, visit www.siha.de

extravaganza for essen

The CarTier Travel With Style Concours will showcase 56 of India’s finest classic cars to a privileged audience at The New Delhi Jaipur Polo Club on March 12, including cars unseen for more than 70 years.

Diljeet Titus’s 1930 Stutz with its unique four-seat dual-cowl speedster bodywork hasn’t been

seen in public since it starred at the 1930 Olympia Motor Show. And Cartier is having a 1911 Rolls-Royce 40/50HP Silver Ghost known as ‘The Throne Car’ restored for the event. Ordered new by the Mahbub Ali Khan, Nizam VI of Hyderabad, the Silver Ghost will leave the ‘City of Pearls’ for the first time in a century.

Cartier Concours returns to India

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merica: Love it or hate it, you’ve got to hand it to its people – they do things on a different scale to us. As I write, I’m flying home from Arizona where a week-long whirlwind of auctions has just wrapped up, which, if you’ve never been before,

you’ve got to experience firsthand at least once in your life. Subtle? You’ve come to the wrong show. Scottsdale, a flat,

sprawling town described by The New York Times as ‘a desert version of Miami’s South Beach’, has played host to the season-opening classic car auctions for the past 40 years. Punters flock there from across America and beyond to enjoy the warm weather, be entertained and, perhaps, take home a souvenir.

‘Upscale’ is a label the Americans are fond of, loosely used to market anything expensive. To European ears it sounds like something that’s just, well, bigger than usual. And most things here are just that, whether it’s the cars, the people or the venues. Biggest of them all is Barrett-Jackson, the auction to end all auctions, an arena where the 1300 cars that are up for sale vie for the attentions of 250,000 people in the space of one week. It’s pure entertainment and the cars are, quite frankly, secondary to the event. B-J rents out pitches in its fenced-off compound to outside vendors, so while taking a breath of hamburger and popcorn-scented air between battling other bidders you can browse stalls offering everything from bronze sculptures depicting Native American squaws ($8500, water feature included) to jacuzzis, aeroplanes and helicopters and, if it all gets too much, water beds.

If your motoring tastes veer towards European classics, you might be disappointed. But if you’ve always lusted after a hot-rodded milk truck, you’ve found heaven: think Superbowl meets Disneyworld. What it may lack in finesse, it more than makes up for in business terms: all of those 1300 cars were sold (earning 18 per cent on each, thank you very much), and that’s before you tally up the proceeds from admission fees for a quarter-of-a-million people and the organisers’ share of all the burgers and water beds they bought. Appropriately, it’s held under a circus tent – the biggest in the world, of course.

Walking around RM and Gooding’s auctions across town the next day you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a different country. No milk trucks, customised or otherwise, and not a jacuzzi in sight. But if you fancy a Ferrari, you were spoilt for choice, from a modern FXX to a shiny red 166 Barchetta (although half-an-hour after reading the catalogue entry I was still scratching my head trying to figure out which bits of it started life before 2010 or anywhere near Maranello).

As for the bidders, it’s as if they’re on Viagra. Once their hand goes up, it stays there. Sellers don’t mess around either. In Europe some would rather cut their arm off than take a loss. In the US they just cut their losses and move on. The results are plenty of record prices, a few bargains and lots of happy punters.

The award for the craziest result of the weekend must go to the gentleman who bought the hand luggage-sized 1959 Autobianchi Bianchina Trasformabile for £52,000. When the news reaches Italy they’ll probably put it back into production.

So forget that dreary winter back home – now you know where you should be headed next January...

Bigging it up at the auction to end all auctions

SimonKidston

A

Simon Kidston lives and works in a world filled with the finest classics. In between acting as a consultant to collectors and performing as the multi-lingual presenter at top European events, Geneva-based Simon (www.kidston.com) finds time to enjoy his own cars, including a Porsche 911 Carrera 2.7 RS and a Lamborghini Miura SV.

APRIL 2011 /cLAssIc cARs [[2r]]

Figoni et Falaschi-bodied 1939 Delahaye won Best of Show at the last event in Mumbai in 2008

BMW will commemorate 75 years of its 328 sports car

Audi will show its racing side