The increasing price of nostalgia | Column | Articles

In one respect you can’t put a price on nostalgia.  On the other hand I found that my nostalgia for a VW Corrado VR6 was stronger than reality.  Now that I’ve bought and sold the Corrado I don’t have a desire to own another one. I also discovered that having to maintain a parts horde for an old ’90’s VW that doesn’t have good factory support turns into a much larger amount of money than expected.

One thing i have found is that you really can’t go back. It never seems to live up to the memory.

However….you Can make new memories – just don’t expect it to be the same as it once was. Go a different route than you did in the past. My first car was a ’61 MGA that I restored to pretty good show quality. My new one is full race mechanicals and 4 different colors of primer and overspray that I autocross and track – having an absolute blast, but it won’t win any beauty pagents.

Depends what it’s for. Pleasure drives, car shows, track rat, or ?. On my first custom car, it had a dead stock drivetrain and a really nice shell and paint job. I dreaded taking it on track and hurting the paint. My second car had a fully-built engine with a much less stressful body and paint job. That one, I dreaded taking it on track and hurting the drivetrain – all self-imposed stress. So, ask yourself what you want the car for, how it would be used, who’s going to maintain it, and whether there’s time and budget for both.

I half expected the article to be about the SiR that you just bought at auction.