Photography by Jonathan Shears & Andrew Schneider
It’s confession time: I have a Katy Perry song stuck in my head, specifically “The One that Got Away.” I assure you, though, that this song is only playing on a loop in my inner jukebox because it has me thinking about cars. No really, I swear.
Unless you’re Jay Leno (who, evidently, has never sold a car in his life), you just can’t buy every car you covet, nor can you keep every car that comes into your possession. Sometimes, the lack of time, money, or space (or all three) conspire such that a car cannot be purchased, or has to be sold. Sometimes, they just get away.
I have spent plenty of time pondering such matters–some might even say too much time when such philosophizing results in referencing Katy Perry in these pages.
One time, when I was a teenager, I tried my damndest to convince my father that he should buy a certain dilapidated sports car. After all, why buy that new sedan with a bumper-to-bumper warranty when you could have this future classic for the same price? I even compiled graphs and data showing my father that he would be saving money on the deal, so long as we ignored the fact that it needed much work and couldn’t possibly accommodate the entire family and focused instead on its potential for value appreciation. Looking back, my father was probably wise to ignore my advice.
Still, not all of my instincts have been wrong, though this does not mean I have always acted correctly upon them. At one time, for instance, I could have purchased (with a significant loan, at favorable terms) a Ferrari Daytona for relative peanuts, or an early Porsche 911 for what, now, would seem like pennies on the dollar. At that time, though, they were just used cars, with prices that reflected their also-ran status.
But, hey, I prefer to look on the bright side. If I had bought all those cars in years past, I would scarcely have room to move around my current garage. Besides, I’m now married and my wife would not take kindly to having her car booted out of the garage to make room for my collection. Like I said, I’m trying really hard to look on the bright side here.
I now throw the question out to you, the reader: What’s the car that got away from you, the car that you did not buy but wish you had, or the car that you sold, but wish you had not? Leave your stories in the comments below.