Ten minutes with Damian Jones of H&H Classics


Damian Jones, Sales Manager at H&H Classics, has a front-row seat to witness the various intricacies of the classic car market. We sat down with Damian at H&H’s recent Imperial War Museum Duxford sale to discuss the current shape of the market, to hear about his career highlights, and to muse on where it all might be headed.

 

Hi Damian, thanks for making time in what is obviously a very busy day for you. Are there any particularly notable cars that have been sold through H&H under your watch?

Yes, I’ve been very fortunate. I was involved with the sale of the ex-Richard Colton Ferrari 250 GT SWB, I’ve been involved in the sale of an ex-Graham Hill Lotus 72, the ex-Fox & Nicholl Talbot 105 1932 Le Mans team car, the ex-Woolf Barnato Bentley 4 ½ Litre Tourer, I’ve been very fortunate to have been around the company at that time and have handled some of the nicer cars.

 

 

Have you got a favourite from those?

 I did really like the (Richard Colton) short wheelbase, that one because that was a car the like of which I probably won’t see again. Not because we won’t handle another short wheelbase, but just because that car had been in single ownership for forty years. It’s probably the only short wheelbase I will ever encounter that an owner had taken an aerosol can and just blown the nose in, because that was his car… he wanted to keep on top of it mechanically, he didn’t really care about the cosmetics, as long as it was healthy and he could just jump into it. And that car, all the time we were doing magazine features and film shoots, it was so well behaved. You just went to it and turned the key.

(Note – when enthusiast Richard Colton died at age 82, his prized UK-delivered 1960 Ferrari 250 SWB (owned since 1970), his 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 (owned since 1974), and a V12 E-Type Coupe were auctioned and the proceeds donated to the RNLI. Colton was famous for driving his cars hard – he kept them in fine fettle, but didn’t care too much for cosmetics. The sale raised over £8.5million for the charity)

 

 

More broadly speaking, where do you think the market is heading?

I think there’s been a little more rationale over the last twelve to eighteen months. But still, if things are sought after, big money is still being paid for them. But otherwise, there tends to be more of a focus on condition and originality, those seem to be the two big watch words. It seems predominantly stable, I think it has undergone a bit of a correction, but then again that’s no bad thing in terms of the market’s long-term health.

I guess it just depends what’s in vogue, I mean, that RS200 that Silverstone sold at the NEC was just incredible. There’s still the occasional headline, but it’s not uniform, it’s not everybody stamping in saying ‘it’s an old car, I must buy it, I don’t care what I’m paying.’ It’s websites like your own which give much more knowledge to potential purchasers, I think people do a lot more homework these days and they go into it with their eyes open.

 

Looking forward to the next 12 or 24 months, are there any cars that you think are a hot tip?

If you look at where prices have been going over the last couple of years, there’s certainly a lot more interest in 90s machinery. We’re moving on now, 2020 is not that far away, when suddenly a 1990 car will be thirty years old.

There’s a sort of cross-over with the 1990s; you can still get some comparatively old tech cars (in modern terms) that aren’t completely slaves to a laptop. And there’s some interesting market trends, at Pebble Beach this year you could have bought a factory Lightweight E-Type and a short wheelbase Ferrari, all for the same money as a McLaren F1. A few years ago, if you’d said that to people they’d have thought you were crazy.

So again, we’re moving up towards more modern collectable cars. You look at the success of the Fast & Furious franchise, you look at R34 Skyline’s, there is a movement for that.

So, if you’re looking at areas where there’s been more interest, we sold that ex-Colin McRae Impreza. We’ve sold that twice. First in October 2015, which people will tell you is after the peak of the market, for £155,000, and then this June for £240,000. So, prices are still going up for the right things, they’ve come down for others, but it is a more complicated thing.

 

 

On the subject of more modern cars, have you noticed a change in the buyers in the last 24 months?

Well, it’s cliché but it’s true. You still get that thirty-year rule. There are people turning around and after thirty years, maybe their kids are in university and they’ve just got a bit more disposable income.

 

Talking about E-Types and short wheelbases is brilliant. But, say you’ve only got five grand to spend on something to have some fun in, maybe with a view to seeing some small growth. What would you buy?

Probably the best first-gen Impreza I could find.

 

Are there any cars around today that don’t excite you?

Modern cars. I think it’s really difficult, nobody makes a bad car anymore.

You know, when I was growing up and starting my first job and worked in the States for a while, you could still buy some really awful, awful cars. I mean, truly, you didn’t understand how the manufacturer could get away with it because they were just so dire. And that’s just not true anymore, but there are an awful lot of things which are just quite bland.

And then unfortunately, and I do think it’s quite unfortunate, it will be interesting to see what happens to the value of a lot of really exciting cars that you can buy today that just happen to be diesel.

 

What’s your take on the modern phenomena of limited production runs of special cars? Or more specifically, those built purely in an attempt to stir up more demand than supply?

It’s interesting because with a manufacturer like Porsche, there’s got to be somebody out there who feels slightly hoodwinked. You know, ‘we’re not going to build a manual 911 (GT series) anymore, if you want one then you’ve got to buy a 911R. That’s it.’ And then… ‘oh look we’re making one now…’

I think you can only pull that card so many times before people get wise to it. And then ultimately, a lot of it is just down to getting on a waiting list. I guess it depends how manufacturers do it. If they drip feed limited editions onto the market, then fine. But if they do it as a get rich quick scheme… if they’re suddenly making more just because it’s a particular shade of green…

 

 

And your thoughts on people speculating on brand new cars, and doubling their money in six months?

I think it’s one of those things that depends on the wider economy. Buying a new supercar to speculate on is still very unregulated. If the global economy strengthens and improves, people will go towards better understood and more regulated assets like stocks and shares, like property, that sort of thing.

 

As petrol-heads, there’s nothing that saddens us more than seeing all these amazing cars just locked away, waiting for their values to increase exponentially.

That’s when it gets slightly weird, because you have these modern hypercars, and they are all the ultimate driving machine, nicking BMW’s phrase. And they are in carcoons. And then you speak to the experts, we know people from the Porsche factory, and they’re always saying that these cars need at least 2000km per year. With anything less than that, if you just have them static, it doesn’t matter how beautifully they’re stored. Lubricants will drain out of bearings, and they will effectively be dry when the car is next used. They say that a lot of these cars, especially when they’ve been parked away for ten or fifteen years, people will bring them in and they need to be stripped and rebuilt.

 

Is that a worry for yourselves as an auction house, in having cars that might not have been driven so much? Or is it just part of the landscape?

Personally, I like driving cars. But there are a lot of people who really appreciate cars and driving isn’t an aspect. We do come across collectors and that’s literally it, they come out after dinner, they hit the button and all the garage doors go up and their friends get to wow and look at all these cars. We’ve known collectors and they’ve got all these old Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Astons, and modern ones too. And they don’t drive the old ones, because by modern standards, they say that they’re horrible.

They are challenging and scary (to drive) and they’re always worried that the old one will break down. They say, ‘I’ve got a Gallardo and a Muira, I drive the Gallardo, the Muira looks pretty’. So that can be the case. It’s horses for courses – you buy it, you own it, you do what you want with it.

 

In terms of having a particular car in a future sale, is there anything that you’d particularly like to come through H&H?

Yeah. I really like chassis 1075, the Ford GT40 that won Le Mans twice. I just think that’s mad, to win Le Mans once, hats off. But to do it twice, that’s just incredible.

 

Thanks for your time, Damian. Good luck with tomorrow’s sale. 

 

View the results from the Imperial War Museum Duxford sale here.