EP45: Pebble Beach 2025: Auctions Report: Veni Vidi Vici

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

• ZZ Top – PCH
• RM Sothebys
  • Yellow F50
  • “The Silicon Valley” McLaren F1
  • Ferrari 375 plus
  • Ford GT MkiV
  • Avoiding Zack Brown

• ZZ Top – Just Got Paid

• Lotus 70 and a discussion on high wings, safety and aesthetics
• Ollie prefers the 80’s McLaren MP 4/4 to modern F1 McLarens
• Schumacher’s 1997 Ferrari F310
• Alfa T33
• O compares three F40s, an LM, a blue one and a normal red one
• William Ross, the Ferrari guy
• Black Cherry McLaren Speedtail
• A digression on McLaren F1s
• When J saw Gordon Murray in the prototype McLaren F1
• The Tour d’Elegance

• What it is, why J and O visit, and why people drive their cars in it

• Avoiding people seeing their cars for the first time on the lawn
• J is friends with the only car with bad paint on the tour, naturally
• And why said car did not appear on the concours lawn
• Ugly Virgil Exner concept cars
• Bendy A-pillar Lambo
• O is picky about his Lamborghinis
• A Purple over cream leather Diablo SV with mirrored wheels, Mark Gammie Rap Producer Spec
• Gooding

• • Has merged with Christies; to better compete with RM/Sotheby’s ?
  • Gt3 / Group 3 Racecars – a 911, a BMW M8
• MECUM

• • O sits in a Pantera, and is reminded of Elvis shooting his Pantera
  • What is the Pantera?
  • O sits in a Ferrari BBi, with a graphic equalizer
  • A nap interrupted by a sidepipe Cobra; then setting off the Tundra alarm
  • Hippy Porsche 917k replica
  • Working on a Superformance GT40 through the bulkhead
• Bonhams
  • Morikawa; A Gran Turismo Country Club
  • Vs Monticello
  • Ollie goes two for two setting fast laps on someone else’s sim rig
  • Assetto Corsa, driving the long dreamed-of Glickenhaus
  • O setting the lap record at Brooklands in Lewis’ first F1 car
  • “That sidepipe Corvette”
  • Bugatti Edwardian Giant
  • Fake ‘69 Charger R/T but with a 440 and a pistol grip who cares?
  • Smokey Yunick “68 Camaro Trans Am car
• Pagani in the house

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider hailing from California. He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Jon Summers: Good day. Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to a Motoring historian with me, John Summers and

Ollie: Oliver

Jon Summers: making a second appearance. I think Ollie now.

Ollie: Yeah, this one will be better.

Jon Summers: There’s nothing wrong with the old one and anybody who wants to hate on what we’re doing,

Ollie: feel free. You know,

Jon Summers: whatever. The world’s not full of haters.

The world’s full of lovers. And you know, cups are full, not, they want to hate on us for being boring and rambling. They can,

Ollie: yeah, that’s [00:01:00] fine.

Jon Summers: But we’re not doing that. Are we? We’re coming to the point, and I brought you on the pod today ’cause we have just got back from Pebble Beach. 2025

Ollie: concourse de elegance.

Jon Summers: Yeah. The concor de de elegance as Google would have it. Which, uh, yeah, even worse French pronunciation than me. Yeah. But we were there for a week, weren’t we? Yeah. So, uh, look, here’s the agenda. Uh, you are looking at the listeners. Poor blighters, can’t see it, but look, right, there’s an agenda that we’re gonna talk you through.

All right? We’re gonna do it by the days. So you don’t even need to look at the agenda or Ollie. So that first day we went to rn, didn’t we? Yeah. We rolled down there and we went into the middle of Monterey to the Portola Hotel, a spa where they laid the cars out in such a way that if you don’t want to pay, you can see some cars.

From like outside, you know, nose pressed on the glass kind of, or if you pay a little bit, I think it’ll be $60 this year. They give you the nice catalogs and you can [00:02:00] get in and see all of the cars and they’re sort of, they take over a little patio, they take over the front of the hotel and then they have cars lying around in inside the old hotel there,

Ollie: there’s only really like two or three cars that are actually inside the hotel.

It’s more the like expensive stuff. Well, I mean, it’s all expensive. That’s kind of a lie, but

Jon Summers: what did we see?

Ollie: Well, we saw a yellow F 50, and then there was a silver McLaren F1. We didn’t actually go back to Sotheby’s in the future, but it looks like there would be another car. Or two coming in to the,

Jon Summers: yeah, it looked a bit thin in comparison to other years.

I wondered if that was, ’cause the numbers were down. But that said there was a 3 7 5 plus that I liked very much. Will insert a little picture of that. It had these little like bumper let kind of things and bumper up kind of cut outs for it. Never seen that body star before. So that interest me, the McLaren that Ollie mentioned.

Yes, it was, uh, known as the, uh. The phrase was the Silicon Valley car, [00:03:00] which to me, ’cause it had always been owned in, in Silicon Valley. Do you know, um, I don’t know. I didn’t read the auction description. The, uh, catalog’s still in the truck. We digress. Rm what else was that rm?

Ollie: There was, there was a whole, the F

Jon Summers: 50, you like the yellow F 50?

Ollie: No, I didn’t, I don’t love F 50. You don’t

Jon Summers: love F fifties.

Ollie: F forties are a better looking car. There was a out on the, in the front area there was. What they were calling a four gt. It was a Mark four, but it came out in 2024 and it’s like kind of a remake on the 2017 model. So it kind of had that kind of look, but it was a race car and actually we went down to Laguna later.

And we saw it there racing and it had a very, very good exhaust note.

Jon Summers: Well, thank you for that, Ollie, because uh, you were most taken with that new Mark IV when we were at rm and it was really cool that we then saw it on the track at Laguna later in the weekend. Yeah, the tail lights are holes.

Ollie: Yeah.

Listeners, you might know [00:04:00] that the most recent four GT has round taillights. You could actually see the light tire through the light because they’re circles, which was very cool.

Jon Summers: So just when you stand off the rear three quarter of, I’ll try and find a picture to illustrate it. But the point is you can see through the light and the flying buttress is cut away, and then the tires right there.

Exposed. It’s, it’s really the most astonishing piece of architecture. It’s really, if it had just been designed like that, you’d think it was amazing and cool, but it’s not. It’s for aerodynamics and Well, yeah, it actually works and, and I mean,

Ollie: Ford can put together a car that looks great, wins races.

Jon Summers: We kept nearly meeting Zach Brown, didn’t we?

We saw him there on the lawn. The boss of McLaren, Ollie just mouthed me. Who’s that? The boss of the current boss of McLaren. He was there on the lawn when we were by the McLaren, so we didn’t listen to him then. And he was at rm And remember Forres was taking pictures of him?

Ollie: Yeah. You called him River. As we were driving in, he was like, [00:05:00] hopefully my friend River’s there.

Jon Summers: I always do. It’s like

Ollie: it’s forest.

Jon Summers: I always do, I always do get it mixed up. But

Ollie: there was the, the high wing was a four a 1970.

Jon Summers: Low to 70, wasn’t it?

Ollie: Yeah, it was in the era of the high wing. So it’s got that like really tall wing that. Actually, my dad pointed out that it, it mounted like to the suspension or to the engine.

I don’t remember which.

Jon Summers: To the suspension. It bolts right on top of the suspension. So the downforce goes right through the suspension. Not toward dangerous, of course. What could go wrong?

Ollie: I mean, if I’m like there with my however much money and I’m looking to buy something, I never like the look of them. I don’t know how you feel, but, oh, I never liked the look of the high wing.

Jon Summers: I’ve only been able to accept that high wing look since I’ve been doing the class talking about the history of Formula One at Stanford. Yeah, before that time I like, I [00:06:00] couldn’t bear look at them. I was like, how? And of course that’s part of the reason why they outlawed them. It was partly the danger, but it was partly that everyone in the pit lane was like, they looked terrible.

What on earth? The cars aren’t beautiful anymore.

Ollie: We saw quite a few modern 4 0 1 cars at Pebble, and if you get close to them, I don’t think they’re that beautiful. Compare when Cross McLaren, MP four, stroke four is next to it. It’s like, are you really comparing. Those two. Yeah. I’m,

Jon Summers: I’m almost pleased that we’ve moved off theme a little bit here because it was 75 years of Formula One.

Ollie: Exactly. 75 years not elegant, and

Jon Summers: there was a display of Formula One cars at Laguna Se wasn’t there that we spent a long time looking at. Yeah. And there, there was a McLaren there. There was a McLaren. At RM that, that we were both looking at and the shape is fascinating. You know, if you compare it with, this is

Ollie: modern Formula one.

This is a

Jon Summers: modern form, this is a contemporary McLaren. If you compare it with Louis’s, McLaren [00:07:00] Mercedes from 10 years ago, it’s amazing how much the materials and the smoothness and things have changed. They’re also much, much bigger.

Ollie: Yeah, they’re, they’re like twice the length of, there was also Michael Schumacher.

Car was there,

Jon Summers: like a 98 car

Ollie: and it was like so small.

Jon Summers: It, it did, it looked kind of like a, like, like a little hot rod Formula three. Yeah, it looks like, it

Ollie: looks like a Formula Three or four car for the size.

Jon Summers: This was a Casa Ferrari by the way, but which we’ll

Ollie: get to later. Yeah.

Jon Summers: But let’s stay on Formula One here, because Ollie, you rightly made a very good point that the judges at Pebble awarded.

The MP four, stroke four, which is the car that McLaren fielded in 88, the famous year of the center Prost rivalry where they won 15 of the 16 races. Arguably most dominant seasons ever. The simplicity of the aerodynamics day is quite noticeable, isn’t it? And it. Is it means that [00:08:00] although these are pure racing cars, elegance has always played into their design somewhat.

Those high wings went away for that reason. But let’s come back to rm. We were most taken, or you were most taken with that Alpha Romeo, they believe T 33. Um, if you’ve seen the movie Ford versus Ferrari, you’ve seen it in the backdrops, the alpha that they use for sports racing in the. Late sixties, I think T 33.

They had one of those, didn’t we? We looked at that quite closely. Then a number of Alpha GTAs as well, like Alpha GTAs? Oh, yeah. Through the ages. Alpha Juniors, um, they, they

Ollie: had a bunch of, like the same model. They had at least four and then they had one like Lamo Spec car Le Mans. Sorry, I’m American.

Jon Summers: Oh, they had a Lemars spec F 40, didn’t they?

Ollie: Oh yeah. They also had a, it was an LM addition F 40, which was inside Know you prefer, you prefer the base, like completely clean. I hate it. There were three [00:09:00] F Fortys at rm. There was a red one, a blue chip car is what they were calling it. It’s like this weird blue.

Jon Summers: You know, everyone pays a premium for the blue car because like the blue

Ollie: car was estimated we need William

Jon Summers: Ross.

Now the high tell us how much more the blue ones are worth now.

Ollie: But yeah, the, the high end of the blue, like the high end of the estimate for the blue car was 4.5. The LM high end. Was four and then the high end for the red stock car was 3.5 or maybe 3.75, whatever. I just think the LM had like a wing adjuster, so they had, everybody knows that like F 40 wing, they had like cut off the ends of the wing and they had replaced it with like this carbon fiber adjuster.

It had like modern Michelin tires on it, slick tires. It had new headlights. Clear, better headlights and sparkle racing seats and five point harnesses and, and the blue chip car. If you’re buying an F 40, if you have [00:10:00] $5 million, don’t buy a blue chip car. Everybody likes the red F 40.

Jon Summers: Alright, well, you know.

Yeah, but here’s the thing. I believe, and again, we need William to confirm this, but my understanding is that something different than the normal is what commands the value.

Ollie: Who’s William?

Jon Summers: William Ross, who you met. The other motoring podcast network personality. So he is like

Ollie: your friend within the podcasting space?

Jon Summers: Yeah. You met him?

Ollie: Yeah. Yeah. I, me

Jon Summers: and Eric came and stayed. I know I met

Ollie: him. I’m the viewers need to know though.

Jon Summers: I guess the viewers do need to know. Yeah, but we act like, you know, it’s just you and I in the pub, so to speak.

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Jon Summers: You drinking your alright. Alright. Um, anything else on rm? Was there anything else on RM that we liked?

I

Ollie: know this is, people watching or listening probably already know this, but I was just, I have a friend at school named, um, Johnny and he loves modern supercar and in the corner at RM was a McLaren speed tail. You probably know what one of those looks like.

Jon Summers: It’s kind of black cherry, wasn’t it?

Ollie: Yeah, it was kind of a nice color.

I kind of like a black cherry color, but it had like a tan interior. But what I didn’t realize is most people know that like a McLaren F1 has three seats and then the driver sits in the middle, and then the passengers sit on either side of the driver, like a little [00:12:00] bit behind. I didn’t realize that the McLaren speed tail had that design or had that feature.

I think it was like a modern, I think it was McLaren doing a modernized version of the F1, because I hate to be a killjoy, but I don’t really like the look of the original F1 unless it’s the like LM edition, the like orange edition.

Jon Summers: Yeah. So you don’t like the Lamar F 40, but you do like the Lamar McLaren.

Ollie: I didn’t say that. I just think it looks better than the stalk McLaren F1.

Jon Summers: Mm. I was never that in to the. Stock McLaren F1. Do you know my story about McLaren F1? When I sold aerial photographs that summer in Worcester, I used to drive very fast along the road between Worcester and Stratford. It’s a winding road, and one day there was roadworks and I was pissed off to be stuck at the roadworks.

There was sat there at the road. And when the lights went green, I put the old Cortina first, second, took second, and as I was speeding along the narrow [00:13:00] contraflow section of closed road waiting to come the other way was car I had not seen on the road before. It had not made production. I had only seen photographs of it in magazines.

A McLaren F1.

Ollie: Why is that so crazy?

Jon Summers: Dude, it was on the road. It had not been launched to the public before, so as I approached, did it? No.

Ollie: Like did they have the like sun? It was

Jon Summers: silver. It had the sun roof. Weird

Ollie: sun.

Jon Summers: Gordon Murray was driving it. I swept past him at 80 miles an hour scattering him with stones from my battered blue Cortina.

Thank you. Drive through. Then we had Chinese food. ’cause you always like to have Chinese food. Yeah, my, then we retreated to the Ridge Mark Hotel. Now we don’t wanna dwell on accommodation. The Ridge Mark

Ollie: Hotel and Spa is what they called it. But that was a little resort and spa. Where a steps too,

Jon Summers: there’s a golf club, but you can’t swim there and there’s nobody gonna massage you.

In fact, everyone goes home it seems what? Eight o’clock? Everything’s like locked up at eight o’clock. Lord knows what happens. If you can’t get in your room past eight [00:14:00] o’clock because, uh, anyway, but whatever, we stay there because as everyone knows, pebble accommodation’s ridiculously expensive. So we just stay a ridiculous distance away to save money

Ollie: an hour away.

So a third of the way back to our house, every time we come back from Pebble, we’re going a third of the way back to our house.

Jon Summers: Yes. Which, uh, is just part of the ridiculousness of your father Ali. He’s just part of the ridiculousness of your dad. That’s all. All right, so that was the Wednesday. So rested and refreshed.

We then returned on the Thursday morning for the Pebble Beach tour Ance. So just to be clear, the reason why we do the tour is the Tour to Ance is a bolt on to Sunday’s, pebble Beach, Concord Antes. And the tour is your opportunity to see the cars that are gonna be on the lawn on the Sunday. It’s your opportunity to see them driving all around, hear them running.

We always go and see the start of that. If you get there about seven o’clock, seven 30, it’s also good for networking. ’cause [00:15:00] the people that I wanna talk to are always right there. You get to see the cars running.

Ollie: It’s also a, it’s a big, well, not huge, but it’s a good thing if you do the tour, because that counts towards your judging if you don’t complete the tour.

IE if your car breaks down, then that’s like a point already automatically took off of your, um, score.

Jon Summers: Yeah, the, uh, the whole idea with the tour is it’d be a tiebreaker. So if you come to the event and you drive your car down to Carmel and back on the Thursday, you are more involved in hobby than if you just pay Paul Russell to restore the car and then show up on the lawn on Sunday.

See it for the first time. Pay out with your family. Hope to win best in class, but hope not to, uh, have to drive it across the block because you’ve never actually driven it before and it’s gonna be rather embarrassing trying to drive a vintage car across the block.

Ollie: That’s happened before. That’s happened before.

Yeah. That,

Jon Summers: that is, uh, well that’s a fairly regular feature of Pebble there, so well look. What about the [00:16:00] tour? Well, when I was down in LA Hoa a few weeks ago, I met a chap who has a few nice Porsches, and one of the Porsches was on the tour. So we met him and hung out with him. And I only realized with some irony, Ollie, that you and I, uh, of all the cars on the tour, I knew the one with the very worst paint because, uh, this car’s an original bomb.

Fine. Four cam 3, 5, 6.

Ollie: No, he, he took the four cam engine out. And what engine did he put in? A

Jon Summers: nine 12. A nine 12 in it now he put a

Ollie: nine 12 engine in it and um, I’m

Jon Summers: not sure if the other people on the tour actually know that’s, I know he told us that Ollie, but I’m not sure if the other people on the tour knew that.

Ollie: So he did the tour. Fast forward to when we were on the lawn. As soon as we got in, we bumped into him. We started talking about this. My, my dad asked like, where is your car? And he was like, oh, it’s not on the lawn. I would have to put the four cam engine back in it and like, I’m too lazy.

Jon Summers: [00:17:00] Yes, yes. That’s exactly what he said.

Yes, that’s exactly what he said. He’s definitely a driver, not a show. Greg, we need more people like that, like him in the hobby, and I’m pleased that we had that interaction with him. So, what else about the tour, Ollie? Anything else to say about anything else? We see ugly Virgil Extra cars this year. Yes.

We, we don’t wanna be haters, we want to be lovers. We wanna love the F 40. Not hate on the LM variation, but

Ollie: I don’t hate it. I just, it’s not a nice, it’s not, it’s not a good looking car to get. Toyota Harrises does not look good.

Jon Summers: The GR looks okay. Anything else to say about the tour before? Uh, we pivoted goodie.

Ollie: There was a, I don’t know what the model was, but it was some kind of Lamborghini. What was it? Where those like pushed back lights. The lights like, looked like they were pushed into the hood. What

Jon Summers: era? Lamborghini.

Ollie: It was like mirror era. Do you not remember? It was silver.

Jon Summers: Oh, the silver one? Oh, yes. Yeah.

Premier era. Some kind of a special body, three 50 or 400 or something like that.

Ollie: That did not [00:18:00] look good.

Jon Summers: You didn’t like that?

Ollie: Yeah. Oh, I like that. I mean, there’s, there’s only like one Lamborghini that I feel looks good, and it’s Diablo, the Diablo.

Jon Summers: You are a tough self. Well, all these modern, you’re gonna be offending all these listeners Ollie by saying negative things.

That’s why we don’t say on fine if, if you’re like things on the park,

Ollie: if you’re someone who loves supercars, loved Lamborghini.

Jon Summers: You know, as I said, I’ve, I’ve always had a role for Lamborghini. We forgot to mention RM at that purple Diablo sv. Oh, the Mark Gamy that became a successful rap music producer in his thirties that Mark Gamy would’ve owned that Diablo SV Purple with the cream interior and the mirrored wheels.

It was really Florida plastic, wasn’t it? That car we like. All right, well then we went into Gooding and what did we see in Gooding? We kind the fact that they’ve merged with Christie’s now, which I thought was interesting [00:19:00] because I felt like for some years now, RM who had merged with Sotheby’s have been nearly as good as Gooding and now Gooding we’re doing 200 cars, not a hundred.

That was Gooding was doing that. Yeah. Gooding did a lot more cars this year. Now they merged. Feel like that. Yeah, it wasn’t obvious, was it? Maybe they’d been building that way for some time.

Ollie: There were 200 cars.

Jon Summers: What did you remember from goodie?

Ollie: There were a lot of group three cars, which you’ll hear a lot about from me.

Group three, it’s also known as like GT three race cars. So you might see like a race like Hu Con or like a, like a racing nine 11. We’ll put pictures of the cars and,

Jon Summers: but Will, will, I need to know what I’m looking for.

Ollie: I’ll help you with that. I love group three cars. So there was like three or four, at least there, there was a, a nine 11.

Group three. There was A-B-M-W-M something ma.

Jon Summers: It was an ma. I mean it was [00:20:00] toileted, that car.

Ollie: All these actually raised and there was, but they wanted millions of dollars for them. Yeah. ‘

Jon Summers: cause I couldn’t understand it.

Ollie: Well if you, well you were, could go out and raise with them.

Jon Summers: Now you have like

Ollie: $2. You were arguing.

That’s why you don’t understand. You

Jon Summers: were arguing that they were competitive. To, uh, go out and race. Now, I’m not sure if they would be,

Ollie: they’ve made like Evo versions, but that’s as far as they’ve gotten.

Jon Summers: Anything else to note a gooding?

Ollie: There was,

Jon Summers: to be honest, we’ve kind of, for you

Ollie: supercar lovers, there was a Bugatti.

Bowl and de bullied. But

Jon Summers: it wasn’t there. Didn’t

Ollie: see, it wasn’t there. See, it was in the catalog, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there.

Jon Summers: So maybe we need to find out what happened to that car. Was there anything else that was there that we saw that I felt we were kind of flagging a little bit there.

Ollie: Yeah, we, we did gooding like a little less thoroughly as we used to, or had in the past years.

Jon Summers: Yeah. So what did we do then? We’d beat, what did we get? Some lunch or something like that. The next thing I’ve got listed [00:21:00] here was Mika.

Ollie: Yeah, Meum.

Jon Summers: Now we basically got there so

Ollie: many cars,

Jon Summers: walked around a little bit and then just sat down in a kind of exhaustion, didn’t we?

Ollie: Yeah, there was. There’s so many cars there.

I sat in a Pantera. Whenever I think of Paneras, I think of this story that I heard. Apparently Elvis Presley had a yellow Pantera in period. He once got, he was driving it and he got in a heated argument with his girlfriend, or no, he wasn’t driving it. He got in a heated argument with his girlfriend and then he left in a, probably

Jon Summers: in Graceland, their house.

Ollie: Probably

Jon Summers: Damian and I went in there,

Ollie: and then, anyway, he stormed out of the house. Or wherever. He was hopped in his pantera, hoping to blow off some steam, but when it failed to start, he got out of the car and shot at it with his revolver. And now whoever owns this Pantera, there is two bullet holes in the wheel, [00:22:00] so I gotta sit in a red one.

Wasn’t Elvis’s. Didn’t see the bullet holes.

Jon Summers: So were Panera’s built in Italy, planned by an Argentinian, powered by Ford V eight. Is that an Italian car? Is it an American car?

Ollie: I mean the brand’s Italian. Is it as

Jon Summers: cool as a Ferrari? I mean, it’s got the,

Ollie: I mean, I mean it’s got the same light, my arrow. ’cause I also sat in a BB and that felt

Jon Summers: well Tell, let’s talk before you talk about the bb, let’s finish up on the Pantera.

Is the Pantera a muscle car? Is it competitive for a Corvette?

Ollie: No.

Jon Summers: Or is it more like a Ferrari or a Lamborghini? What do you think?

Ollie: It’s more of a Ferrari than a Lamborghini. The closest. I think if you had to compare it to something, you would compare it to,

Jon Summers: I think it’s very hard. You

Ollie: could compare it to a mirror, but anything else on, you could compare

Jon Summers: it to a cobra.

It has no, the American Ford Heart, that’s Ford

Ollie: and the European soul. Shelby is Ford.

Jon Summers: Yeah, but it, but it’s, but the Pantera has. Four VA as a four [00:23:00] Cleveland. It doesn’t have a full

Ollie: field. Everything else is not a four view because Shelby is so American. All

Jon Summers: right. Talk to me about the bb. Now I should say, you were asked not to sit in the BB work.

I, well,

Ollie: dude. After I got out, some dude came up on a golf cart and was like, and told us off, y’all can’t sit.

Jon Summers: Well, you didn’t quite say that, but what was the BB like? It was A BBI, red BBI. To picture it guys

Ollie: of, of course, a lot of people know that that old Ferrari kind of smell. There, there was a radio tuner.

I, I know this is a useless detail, but what, what was it?

Jon Summers: There was a graphic equalizer. Yeah.

Ollie: I’m not from 1840, so I don’t know this, but. Yeah.

Jon Summers: Yeah, it had like a graphic equalizer set up in it. It was a nice car. We did flag a little bit there, didn’t we? And yeah, and one of us did just recoveries energy by having a nap in the car back in the truck there.

Well,

Ollie: I set off the alarm. Oh, well that’s a set. Let’s,

Jon Summers: we’ll move on. Let’s move on to that in a moment. ’cause, uh, whilst you slept, I watched people basically leaving and that’s quite interesting ’cause, [00:24:00] ’cause some quite interesting cars leaving. Yeah. And that meant that. I had made eye contact with

Ollie: Fred Eye contact the

Jon Summers: guy doing the golf cart.

So when you woke up and you were woken up, when that guy fired up a side pipe Cobra across the car park, that’s what woke you up? He woke up and I was like, oh, you’re awake now. I’m bursting for a pee. How in the truck, five more minutes and I’ll go and take a piece. So I went off to take a piece so

Ollie: the, the car was locked

Jon Summers: and I locked him in.

It was bad mistake.

Ollie: So hot and I was like, oh, I just gotta open the door. And you know how on these modern, we were in a 2016 Toyota Tundra and on all these modern cars, when you pull the door, or I don’t even know, probably on old cars too, when you pull the door handle first it unlocks the car like itself, and then you pull it again and it opens the door.

So I pulled it that first time and then it unlocked the car, like the thingy went up and it was like, I’m like, what? Just. Shut up, and I actually had done this before. I have a [00:25:00] very good record with setting off car alarms. I had done this before and my dad had told me to hit the unlock, or I don’t even remember, was it the unlock on the central locking?

Mm-hmm. And I did that and it wasn’t working. So then it finally stopped and I was just like, I didn’t touch anything. I didn’t do anything, and I was trying to go back to sleep, and then it started again. Yeah.

Jon Summers: Yeah. I had the same thought. I come out of the loom coming back, I was like, and

Ollie: then the dude on the golf cart came by and he was like.

Do you know how to stop it? I was like, no, this is annoying. He was just like, he said this in his exact words. Yeah, you look too young to hot wire that. Fine. So apparently the scenario that the car was thought that was happening was that somebody had smashed the window and then reached inside and opened the door.

Yeah. I’m just like that. No. Yeah.

Jon Summers: That’s what it’s like. True. They have a

Ollie: sensor for the glass and

Jon Summers: Yeah. So we live alone. And I should have [00:26:00] just left the keys with you there, but, uh, yeah. Or maybe I should have just peed in the corner of the field rather than try to do things properly. Exactly. And go right the way back inside.

There’s Ferrari

Ollie: surrounding us. Nobody cares. Yeah.

Jon Summers: Anything else on Meum? Uh, because then we went to Bonhams, didn’t we? It’s huge.

Ollie: That’s all I have to say. Yeah. There’s so many cars.

Jon Summers: Meum, you really need to go to every day. There,

Ollie: there were two in the corner. There was a, a short tail, 9 1 7 or nine 17 K. It was a replica.

What Bren? Yeah, no, I think it was Who made the replica? It

Jon Summers: was a, yeah, I, I dunno whether it was an original car or whether it was either way. Delivery was as the car was, it was like hippie colors, but short tail. And apparently that’s the way the car looked for Watkins Glen in 1970. And it seemed to be an original looking car.

If it was original, wouldn’t Beed. It looked, we were,

Ollie: we, we were fooled.

Jon Summers: The other thing that was cool about that was there was GT 40 right next to it, that the super

Ollie: form is GT 40, mark four. Or Mark three long tail. I think it was a tail markt

Jon Summers: two or a markt one. But either way, no, it

Ollie: wasn’t. ’cause it wasn’t a short tail.

It was a long tail.

Jon Summers: Well the [00:27:00] dude had it a part, didn’t he? Oh

Ollie: yeah. He wa he was cranking it. He was, we were waiting there to see if he like started it and he was cranking it over through the bulkhead. He was working on it and yeah,

Jon Summers: he had the seats taken out. And there’s a hatch through the bulkhead that he was working on the starter motor on.

So that was interesting. I never realized that that was how you worked on a GT 40 that No,

Ollie: I would’ve thought if I had the hood, then you could. Yeah,

Jon Summers: you could like lean in. But for that job, he was literally sat in it twisted round. Well, he wasn’t like.

Ollie: Through. He really, yeah. He was comfortably working.

Jon Summers: Yeah. We, we weren’t shoulder surfing him too much though. Were we? We were aware of what’s going on. No, we

Ollie: were mainly looking at the NY ones.

Jon Summers: We were, ’cause I was thinking it’s not starting, it needs to cross the block and it’s not started. That’s why he’s working on it.

Ollie: Do, do you remember the estimate on those?

Jon Summers: Yeah.

Ollie: All right.

Jon Summers: Bonum.

Ollie: Bottoms was the best auction for me.

Jon Summers: And you almost weren’t gonna get out the car, were you Almost too tired to get outta the car? Yeah.

Ollie: So first room,

Jon Summers: well first thing we walk up and they’re like, oh, only 40 minutes [00:28:00] to go. You can come in free. We were like, bonus. Alright then.

Ollie: Bet you don’t know this, but I love sim racing on Grand SMO seven and I have a sim rig right upstairs.

After I do this, I’ll probably do a race or two, but anyway, at Bottoms. There was two sim rigs. You explained the, like track what they were doing and Yeah.

Jon Summers: Yeah. So, so it’s bottom’s auction, right? And in the corner taken up quite a lot of room two sim racing rigs with big screen and a whole diorama set up behind a relief map.

Two wraps, three, and it’s all about. A new driving circuit, driving country club that has, it’s a literal

Ollie: country club with a racetrack

Jon Summers: that has recently opened outside of Tokyo. And at first it wasn’t clear to me what was different from that place in upstate New York, Monticello or Montecito or whatever, whatever it’s called.

But you see with that one. [00:29:00] You buy an apartment and it’s very much a sort of bachelor pad apartment and you are in the apartment and that gives you some track time and you’ve got a mezzanine floor and you can park your cars down below. And what the people, this morikawa thing, what they told me was that they saw it as a country club for the whole family

Ollie: dad racing mom’s tennis thing.

Jon Summers: Yeah.

Ollie: Kids. Swimming.

Jon Summers: Yeah. Yeah. That was the kind of setup that they had. It has like a Japanese tea garden thing. It is crafted so that from the circuit you have views of Mount Fuji. So it’s a little bit like, um, a grando circuit came real.

Ollie: One of the not real,

Jon Summers: it has two long straits on it. The single most interesting thing for me was that in the blurb they say that the maximum.

Speed on the circuit is 280 kilometers an hour.

Ollie: But

Jon Summers: now it seems that seems quite [00:30:00] slow, doesn’t it? You’re like, that’s not very, you know, that feels like a bit of a Oliver’s mount of a, you know, like little like epoxy rie kind of a, like ying ying in. Second and third gear rather than a, you know, spa or burging.

Really let the car out open. Its, you know, stretch its legs a little bit. But actually Ollie, you spent a long time on the sim with it. It was a set of corso that were they,

Ollie: they had downloaded the track on a set of Corsa. I love the race team. Licen House on Grand or Ismo Licen House doesn’t exist on the game.

Very sad Polyphony. If you’re listening, please add Licen house. Anyway, they had click and I was on a central course though, so my wish was granted. I got, I was able to drive Lincoln house on this. The way to describe this course is this circuit that’s most like, it is the nerve gr, it’s much, much shorter than the the nerve green Norwich Lifer.

But it’s got the same kind of flat [00:31:00] out, twisty, twisty, twisty, twisty, flat out, twisty, twisty, twisty.

Jon Summers: It’s got like 22 turns

Ollie: and how, and

Jon Summers: loads of elevation change. So like the clubhouse is like way up above. And then there’s like a twisty uphill kind of, almost like the top of Willow s springy. Kind of section.

And then there’s, there’s like a downhill shoot that’s like, you know, shoot a lefthander and then another lefthander that feels a bit like, you know, p or somewhere like that, doesn’t it? It’s really, uh,

Ollie: but tell the story about breaking so late. It was a guy. Yeah.

Jon Summers: Yeah. So the, the proud moment for us and the, the story that Ollie think quite rightly wants to, uh, have committed to posterity.

So I developed quite good rapport with the American guys who had obviously been hired till I make sure people could do the sim properly, but didn’t really. Know much about the MACO project itself. And then there was another guy in a shirt and tie who knew a lot about the MACO project itself. ’cause I was [00:32:00] sort of saying to him, I don’t understand.

You’re telling me that you don’t need additional subscriptions, but are you trying to sell memberships here? Why are you trying to sell membership for a racing club? In Tokyo. Six in Tokyo, like 6,000 miles away. Like who’s actually gonna do this? Like, I just didn’t understand how it worked. And he came over from us basically.

Like, this isn’t aimed at people like you kind of thing. He didn’t say that obviously, but like he was aimed at like, you know, Zach Brown, you know, he’s aimed at that kind of, you know, he’s aimed at people who travel rich people. Well, no, people who travel internationally for business or somebody who you might, but you’re not

Ollie: joining a country club so you can race your car.

Well, and that is a point because I didn’t.

Jon Summers: I didn’t think it was completely joined up. The vision, I didn’t think it was completely joined up. It’s just a country club’s all about tranquility and if what’s going on outside is golf. That’s tranquil. How tranquil is it? Your mom’s trying to play tennis, you are swimming and all of a sudden, you know, on the film of what’s happening on the track, you see me.

Spin it off the end of the strait at a high rate [00:33:00] of knots, and then I’m like half hanging out of the car and the car’s on fire. You know, that’s not like, that’s not like country club and feng shui. Is it

Ollie: My my proud moment?

Jon Summers: Your proud moment. All right. Yeah. I’m watching the security guard comes over and goes, I’m shutting up like everyone has to leave now.

So I’m looking over Ollie’s shoulder and I’m like, Ollie, how much Mores left? And he’s like, oh, you know, half a lap. Something like that. And as I’m looking, the uh, mare is looking as well and we watch Ollie going into a section of track where there’s, the braking is marked and Ollie goes way past the breaking marker.

Takes a dab, a break well wide of. The actual track marking turns in and I’m thinking as he turns in, he is not gonna get round. He is gonna spin off violently, turns in and it gets loose. And it goes wide. But damie, if he hasn’t got it lined up just right for the No, I intentionally

Ollie: went it wide. Yeah.

Jon Summers: Well I realize that on the exit of the turn [00:34:00] and you could, the guy goes, your son’s fast.

Ollie: I’m like, yeah. Two for two on setting the fastest lap time on a sbri. That’s not mine. This is beside the point a little bit, but we went to Brooklyn’s a little while ago. Like last year. Plus year now. Yeah, last, last summer. And Louis Hamilton’s first F1 car was in the, the like muy part. Anyway, they had turned it into a sim.

They had a best time, best lap time posted up on the wall. I beat it. So I have a picture of that also in the description.

Jon Summers: Yeah, the knack walls. So

Ollie: on two for two with setting the fastest laptop on sim set arm, the net walls to go

Jon Summers: wide on that bit of Brooklyn where there’s a little indent on the egg.

Wasn’t that

Ollie: Yeah, that’s where I was losing some time. Yeah.

Jon Summers: Once the guy from Brooklyn, a volunteer had, had pointed out the better line, which is not the racing line. Yeah. But once you pointed out the slightly faster line, you uh, you immediately laid down the, uh, the fastest line. But on this, like, on this Tokyo

Ollie: [00:35:00] track, I didn’t need You, did I?

Jon Summers: That was faster than either of the reps. Their fastest time they could do was began with a one in the three. Yeah. So you were faster than both of them with that 1 29. And the only thing you said when you came off the rig, you were annoyed because you’d must the final turn, you reckon you’d left off a second on the table?

I left

Ollie: four tenths. It was a 1 29 4, and I think I had, I could have a 1 22 9 if I didn’t. ’cause I dropped a wheel just past the curb on that final one. It wasn’t onto the dirt, but it was onto like that green area. Like the grass

Jon Summers: Cree? Yeah, the

Ollie: grass Cree.

Jon Summers: Yeah, it was, the circuit is designed by tiler. So it shows tel can design a circuit, which feels more like something off grand is mode than a real circuit.

So I went outside and I looked at some of the cars. Whilst you were doing the racing, there were two interesting ones. There was that

Ollie: side pipe, Corvette. Oh

Jon Summers: yeah. The side pipe Corvette that had been campaigned in period split window.

Ollie: So yeah,

Jon Summers: it was a 4 27 car that had been campaigned period. [00:36:00] Buy a Chevy dealership in Santa Barbara.

So, so cool. We have friends in Santa Barbara. That’s the car he needs to buy for the school. Right? He, he’s, he’d blow those royals off their feet, wouldn’t he? On their way to school when they were coming into school, you’d start it up and deafen them. Awesome car. The other car I liked out there, there were two other awesome cars.

There was that Edwardian era. Bugatti. I didn’t, I didn’t see

Ollie: these cars. You

Jon Summers: did. I had you come out and look at the Bugatti. The huge Bugatti looked like, I dunno if it was Lance speed car or if it was a Edward I or pre car. I didn’t remember the Yeah, you did. You looked at, we looked at the engine. It had the two of the cylinders in two casting the vintage, the the Ed Edwardian guy with chain drive.

No. That was one of my favorite cars of the whole weekend. The other car I saw that was almost more compelling, we didn’t look at this ’cause they turfed us out before there was a 69 charger. It was black, it was badges. No, I did see

Ollie: that. I do remember that. Dude. It

Jon Summers: was a pistol grip car. It was badges of an rt, but it wasn’t a real rt.

Who cares? 70. How

Ollie: do you, how do you know?

Jon Summers: Well, I think they said it [00:37:00] was an rt and then I think somebody checked the numbers and said it wasn’t, ’cause there was like a sticker on the windshield saying, oh, we just found out this isn’t really an rt. I didn’t really care. It’s a four speed kit. Stood just right.

It looked great. It was black with red strips. It had magnum wheels on it, didn’t it? It just looked and the pain wasn’t perfect, but I don’t care about that. 75 to 90. That seemed pretty reasonable.

Ollie: Yeah, that’s

Jon Summers: a smoky unit. CAMA there. Wasn’t there a smokey unit? TransAm? CAMA 68 CAMA as well. We didn’t get the brochure, so we didn’t read up on those cars.

No. ’cause

Ollie: as we said, we came, we came late. When we,

Jon Summers: we came, we saw and we conquered the Morikawa track.

Ollie: Yeah, I conquer. Yeah, that’s actually good.

Jon Summers: And then we left. And with that, we are gonna leave you with this final little anecdote of not meeting Ethio. Bani not pronouncing his name properly either.

Ollie: And, uh, I got talking to this lady.

Yeah. And anyway, the lady told me that, um, Horatio or whatever his first name is, Horatio Ani or whatever, was [00:38:00] there in the first room. There was a Zonda and Ara. Oh. And apparently Ani was there.

Jon Summers: Oh. There were a lot of Ani in that first room. I remember that. I didn’t even look at that.

Ollie: And then there was some modern Super Kari thing.

Jon Summers: Yeah.

Ollie: I don’t know what that was called. It, it was like an unheard of brand.

Jon Summers: Yeah. But

Ollie: anyway, Ani was there.

Jon Summers: Thank you. Drive through.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our Motoring Podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, the Motoring Historian, break Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motor Sports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.patreon.com/gt Motorsports.

Please note that the content, opinions and materials presented and expressed in this episode [00:39:00] are those of its creator, and this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Discussing Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance
• 01:35 Exploring RM Sotheby’s Auction
• 06:12 Formula One Cars at Pebble Beach
• 14:29 The Tour d’Elegance
• 18:49 Gooding & Company Auction Insights
• 20:58 Exploring the Pantera
• 23:04 The Ferrari BB Experience
• 23:43 Car Alarm Mishap at MECUM
• 26:13 Bonhams Auction Highlights
• 28:03 Sim Racing Adventures
• 37:40 Final Thoughts and Anecdotes