Cars With Maks

There is a certain type of man — and it is always a man, usually one who describes his personality as “into cars” the way other people describe theirs as “into crime” — who owns a genuinely wonderful classic car and has decided the correct thing to do with it is absolutely nothing at all.

He keeps it in a garage. Not a garage in the sense of a place where cars go to be worked on, argued with, and occasionally set fire to by their own electrical systems. A garage in the sense of a climate-controlled mausoleum, complete with a dehumidifier, a trickle charger, and a soft cloth cover that gets removed twice a year for photographs. The car has a lower mileage than a Nokia 3310 found unopened in a loft. It has seen less daylight than an Icelandic postman in December. And its owner will tell you, with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been asked to justify himself, that he is “preserving it for the next generation.”

He is not preserving anything. He is embalming it. There’s a difference, and the difference is that one of those things still has a heartbeat.

When a Car Becomes a Spreadsheet Entry

This is the great tragedy of the classic car world in 2026. The cars themselves remain magnificent. A Mercedes 190E still rides like a slightly stern Prussian butler. A Lamborghini Murciélago still sounds like the apocalypse being narrated by Pavarotti. But an alarming number of them have been quietly reclassified as assets. Lines on a wealth manager’s PDF, sandwiched somewhere between a Basquiat and a flat in Monaco nobody’s ever slept in.

And an asset, by definition, must not be used. Using it introduces the terrifying possibility that it might depreciate, or get a stone chip, or — heaven forbid — be enjoyed by someone.

I’ll admit, before you accuse me of being one-eyed about this: there’s a real argument for caution. A concours-condition Ferrari 250 GTO genuinely is a piece of engineering history, and nobody sensible is suggesting you should thrash an eight-figure car down a gravel track just to prove a point. Some cars are rare enough, and important enough, that a bit of reverence is earned. Fine. I’ll give you that one.

But that argument gets used to justify an awful lot of cars that are neither rare nor especially important, just expensive because a spreadsheet said so. Nobody needs to treat a Mercedes CLS63 AMG like the Turin Shroud.

The Auction House Problem

Then there’s the second group of people ruining this hobby for the rest of us: the auction houses and their favourite customers. A species of collector who has never changed a spark plug in his life but can tell you, to the nearest £10,000, what a matching-numbers Alfa did at Goodwood last spring.

These people have taken cars that were built to be driven — genuinely, urgently, occasionally badly, down a wet B-road at a speed their insurer would not approve of — and turned them into the automotive equivalent of a Fabergé egg. You can look. You may not touch. And under absolutely no circumstances may you actually go anywhere in it, because going somewhere risks the unthinkable: fun, at the expense of resale value.

Talk to people at a genuine car meet — not an auction preview, an actual gathering of people who own and drive these things — and you’ll hear the same complaint over and over. Something like: “I bought mine to drive it, and now I can’t afford to insure it for what these auction prices say it’s worth.” That’s not preservation. That’s a market pricing enthusiasts out of their own hobby.

The result is that the price of anything with a folder of history and a badge people recognise has gone up like a scalded cat. A perfectly ordinary BMW E34 M5 — a car that, when new, was bought by moderately successful dentists — now costs more than a house in most of the world that isn’t London or Zurich. And the people paying that money aren’t dentists. They’re investors who couldn’t tell you what a limited-slip differential does but know exactly what one does to a Sotheby’s estimate.

Restomods: A Brilliant Idea, Ruined by Pricing

Now, enter the restomod, riding in like the cavalry — if the cavalry arrived on a horse with a carbon driveshaft and adjustable dampers.

This, on paper, is the answer to everything. Take a car with soul but questionable brakes, questionable rust-proofing, and a gearbox that shifts with all the precision of posting a letter through a hedge, and quietly fix it. Keep the shape. Keep the noise. Keep the point of the thing. But make it stop in a straight line, and not leave a puddle of its own vital fluids on your driveway every time it’s parked for more than a fortnight.

It is, genuinely, one of the best ideas the car world has had in decades. It is preservation with a pulse. A well-sorted restomodded Alfa Giulia or 190E should, in theory, be the thing that gets a whole new generation excited about old metal.

And then you look at the price tag.

Because somewhere along the way, someone worked out that if you take a humble old Alfa — a car that, in period, was bought by architects and people who owned at least one polo neck — and rebuild it with modern electronics, a bespoke interior, and a badge that says “by [Insert Italian Surname Here] Automobili,” you can charge for it as though you’ve also thrown in a small Mediterranean island. Half a million euros. For an Alfa. A car whose original spiritual purpose was to be slightly impractical and mildly unreliable in a charming way, not to require its own wealth manager.

To be fair to the restomod builders, this isn’t pure greed. The engineering involved in a proper restomod — fabricating new subframes, integrating modern ECUs into a forty-year-old shell, hand-building an interior that looks period but hides a modern climate control system — genuinely is expensive, skilled work, done in small numbers by small teams. Nobody’s pretending it should be cheap. But there’s a wide gap between “fairly priced for the craftsmanship” and “priced as a status symbol for people who’ve already got a Bugatti in the other garage,” and an increasing number of builders seem to be aiming squarely for the second one.

This is the same disease as the garage queens, just wearing a nicer jacket. The entire point of a restomod is that it should make brilliant old cars usable again for people who actually want to drive them — not simply invent a new, even more exclusive tier of untouchable object. If your restomod costs more than the house the original car’s owner lived in, you haven’t preserved the spirit of the thing. You’ve built a very expensive coffin with better brakes.

So What Is the Actual Spirit of a Classic Car?

Here, as far as I can tell, is the non-negotiable Spirit of Classic Cars: they were built to be driven. Badly, joyfully, occasionally into a hedge, by people who could afford them without needing a syndicate.

Preservation doesn’t mean sealing something in amber. It means keeping it alive — mechanically, financially, spiritually — so that someone, at some point, gets to experience what a 6.2-litre V8 with absolutely no interest in fuel economy actually feels like at 7,200rpm. That’s what a Mercedes C63 AMG or an SL65 AMG was built for, not sitting under a blanket.

Keep them running. Keep them affordable enough that a normal enthusiast, and not just a hedge fund with a hobby, can own a Pagani Huayra’s spiritual ancestor without selling a kidney. And if you’re going to restomod something, by all means fit it with modern brakes and a stereo that doesn’t sound like it’s being played through a biscuit tin. Just don’t charge more for the privilege than the original manufacturer charged for the entire factory.

Otherwise, all you’ve done is build a very beautiful museum. And museums, whatever else you say about them, are not fun to drive