It's still a great show but has lost some of its eccentricity and some of the bigger players are homing in on it - although the Berliet T100 did impress. I reckon it would be a 3 day job to explore the show fully.
We took time to nose around the Artcurial Auction. Some wildly optimistic reserves/estimates - so not too surprising that many cars were returning to their existing homes on Friday morning. Although the market is flattening out there are people rich/stupid enough to shell out over €200K for a Series 1 E type, €226K for a Chapron Citroen ID19 and even €40K for a humble Isetta 300.
Over 250 F1 race suits/helmets up for auction as well. Didn't stick around for this but there were several Hamilton/Schumacher/Senna helmets with estimates of €30-50K. If you were on a limited budget then Tiago Montero's helmet from his 2006 Spyker campaign was sitting there with your name on it for about €3K (but then again.)
Motorsport-wise a truly gorgeous ex works Alpine 110 was a mere €369,520. We looked over the '66 Le Mans Serenissima Spyder in great detail, looking very much like a 250LM's slightly less delicate sister it was fundamentally reasonably complete and very original. However even cursory examination would have been enough to confirm that it needed an exhaustive nut and bolt restoration to make it a running proposition - with a hefty additional premium if you wanted to race it again. We took a guess at £500K tops so the result of €4,218,800 was impressive....
Thanks to Fiskens for the bottle of Peroni and much attention, perhaps being in my Sunday best was enough to disguise the fact that my life savings would probably just about have bought the airbox on that wonderful Shadow DN5.
Edited by moffspeed, 11 February 2019 - 18:50.