In the 1930s, British sports-car maker MG made exactly
33 of the K3 open-top race car. If you want to buy one now, there are more than
100 to choose from.
No, the defunct carmaker didn’t restart production.
The tripling of the K3 fleet is part of the booming trade in fake antique autos
as soaring prices for classic cars spur sophisticated counterfeits, according to
Bernhard Kaluza, vice president of international antique auto club FIVA.
“In the 1990s, I would find one faked car every five
years,” said Norbert Schroeder, who verifies classic cars at TV Rheinland, a
Cologne, Germany-based technical testing company. “Now I find up to five fakes a
year.”
Vintage cars have gained in appeal, especially since
the financial crunch. Auction values have risen more than sevenfold over the
past decade, according to data from market tracker Historica Selecta. British
auction house Bonhams, which says global sales total more than $1 billion a
year, sold a 1954 Mercedes-Benz F1 car for 19.6 million pounds ($32.1 million)
in July, setting a world record at auction.
The lure of antique autos is evident in the case of a
1955 Aston Martin DB2/4. Bonhams sold the exact same car in unchanged condition
for 230,000 pounds in 2011, more than four times the price paid in 2003, said
James Knight, the head of auction house’s motoring department.
Demand remains high. At a Dec. 1 auction, Bonhams,
which performs numerous checks before accepting a vehicle, sold dozens of
vintage autos, including a 1964 Porsche 904 GTS racing coupe for 1.15 million
pounds.
“People with a lot of money prefer to have a classic
car in the garage than money in the bank,” said Adolfo Orsi, president of
Historica Selecta, a consulting company that specializes in classic cars. “When
there is a lot of money, there are fakes. In today’s world, it is possible to
replicate everything.”
Sophisticated forgers have been known to buy up old
screws and washers, leave reproduced frames in fields to weather and even have
parts copied to make fakes harder to detect. FIVA’s Kaluza says counterfeiters
even bought an old movie theater in France to get the worn antique leather from
the seats.
“The people faking cars are not a few lone wolves,”
said TV’s Schroeder, who has traveled as far as California to authenticate cars,
including evaluating welding joints and chemically testing the metal to
determine its age. “It’s organized crime because it’s expensive to build such
cars and you need a good infrastructure to do it.”
Christian Jenny has confronted the risks. The former
chief information officer of Zurich Insurance Group AG spent five years proving
his rare 1952 Jaguar C-Type convertible was authentic, after another model
showed up on the market claiming to have the same identification number.
The owner of 13 vintage Jaguars consulted numerous
experts, including Norman Dewis, chief test engineer for the British luxury
brand for more than 30 years. With the car valued at about $2.5 million, there
was a lot at stake.
“It might be a problem if you tried to sell the car
years later,” said Jenny, who is now retired and lives in Thalwil, Switzerland.
Verifying the car was “a precautionary measure.”
Authenticating cars isn’t easy. Simon Kidston, a
classic-car consultant in Geneva, was offered an Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ racer from
the 1960s from a seller who claimed to have discovered the car in a scrapyard in
northern Italy.
After consulting numerous sources, Kidston eventually
discovered a photo of a car with the same identification number that was
involved in a fiery crash at the Sebring race in 1964. The driver only barely
escaped.
“It was clear there could be nothing left of the
original car,” said Kidston, who rejected the offer.
Other frauds are subtle, like taking an vintage
Porsche 911 and turning it into a high-performance 911 RS version, which would
quadruple the car’s value.
text credit: © 2013 Leon Mangasarian/Patric Winters/The Detroit News
