Battle Of The Basket Handles

Did someone really just lose $40,000 by choosing the wrong auction company?

ah, to be thirty-four again and have cool cars

Ten years after becoming the owner of a Porsche “993” Carrera 2, I wrote this deeply sentimental piece for Road&Track. In the decade that followed, I watched the value of the car soar to the point where I was no longer comfortable doing all the things that had defined my relationship with it: dumping the clutch ten times a weekend at an SCCA autocross, shifting into fifth at redline while zipping through freeway traffic, leaving it street parked in Nashville, using it to store containers of used motor oil, and so on.

Most importantly, I was no longer comfortable giving it to my son. As a $20,000 used car, it was a lark, something cool he could bash around Ohio with whatever girl caught his fancy. Like Luke Perry’s old 356 on Beverly Hills 90210, which at the time of filming wasn’t worth much more than twenty grand. At $100k or more? Who’d insure him? How would we handle it the first time he backed it into something? Something had to be done.