Low-mileage collector car examples of tuner favorites are driving the market straight to hell for no reason.
The great irony of the modern car scene. All these legendary performance machines, feats of mechanical artistry built to carve apexes —and we’re treating them like Fabergé eggs. Somewhere along the way, owning a very special car became less about driving it and more about admiring it from across the garage with a glass of whiskey in hand. While that’s fine for rare coach-built collectibles or your grandpa’s old Duesenberg, it’s absolutely criminal when it comes to things like an Integra Type R, a car that was engineered, from bumper to bumper, to be thrashed within an inch of its life.
You know the type. The owner with a low-mileage Evo IX MR, who only ever moves it to take to the local coffee shop meet. The guy with the C5 Z06 that hasn’t seen over 4,000 RPM in a decade because it’s now part of his retirement plan. Look, I’m not saying you need to daily your Lotus Exige in a blizzard. I am saying that performance cars were meant to perform. That LSD wasn’t installed for the sake of your Instagram photos. These cars are exercises in purpose-built engineering, and when you strip away their purpose, what’s left? An expensive paperweight with a steering wheel.
The Reason for The Rant
Take the Integra Type R, for example—one of the greatest front-wheel-drive cars of all time. Lightweight, perfectly balanced, and a chassis so dialed in that it damn near made journalists weep. Not only that, but 8,400 RPMs of VTEC glory singing could put a smile on the face of the dead. Yet, people are out here buying them at auction like they’re blue-chip stocks, not driving experiences. Admittedly, the biggest reason for this rant is yet another six-figure ITR sale on Bring A Trailer.
Perhaps the most significant component of this whole shitshow is these sales driving owners of absolutely rancid examples of the same car to think they’re sitting on a pile of gold. Sorry, though, your ITR with tennis-ball-sized rust holes in the quarters isn’t worth $35k because you saw one on Bring A Trailer sell for $102,000. In fact, you can regularly find Type R models for pretty damn reasonable prices on other platforms. Cars and Bids is a great example.
But it’s not just Hondas, is it? We’ve seen this movie with everything from E30 M3s to FD RX-7s. A car gets old, gains a bit of street cred, and suddenly it’s a 401K with wheels on it. Instead of appreciating the engineering, we’re just appreciating the appreciation. Somewhere along the way, folks steered away from “I bought this to drive.” Instead, it became “I bought this to tell people I have it and remind them they’re poorer than me.” It’s a bit like owning a pair of Jordans you never wear because the sidewalk might scuff them.
It’s Your Car, Sure, but I Can Still be Mad About It
There’s a difference between preserving something and neutering it. The Nürburgring lap times, the skid pad numbers, the tales of heroic backroad drives—all of that was earned with wheels turning and tires screaming. None of it was accomplished with a car sealed in a plastic bubble under fluorescent lights. Moreover, your “museum quality” car is a moot point given that any museum could take a shithoused example of the same car and make it look pristine from 10-feet away for far less than you’ll want for your full-scale model.
So drive the damn thing. The engineers didn’t pour years of development into these cars so they could one day be pushed across the Barrett-Jackson stand with white gloves. They built them to be driven hard and fast with a fat, stupid grin on your face. Anything less just feels like missing the whole point.
Oh, and let’s not confuse my irritation here with bitterness that I can’t afford to buy these things. You got me. I can’t. I’m more than at terms with the fact that I can’t swing the purchase of a $100,000 ITR or an $85,000 S2000 CR. I wouldn’t even be mad at these price points if people were driving them, but down the road, we’re all going to just be another hole in the ground. Eventually, the cars will wind up with the same fate on a long enough timeline. So buy a Picasso and get a “tainted” car to take the race track.
