We used to buy younger classics
As a car enthusiast, I bought my first "classic" at the age of 23. However, this car, a Fiat 850 Sport Spider, was just 15 years old at the time, so it wasn't even a youngtimer by today's standards. The next car that was old at the time followed in the same year, a slightly better preserved 850 Spider built in 1971. Then there was a break, followed by a few motorcycle years and "old" cars were no longer so popular with me.
Then in 1993 I fulfilled my wish for a classic TVR. It was a 1978 Taimar, a 15-year-old sports car at the time (picture above). And so it went on. Even the Pagoda, a Mercedes-Benz 280 SL from 1969, was only 24 years old when I bought it, so it was a youngtimer.
In 1998, I bought a TVR 3000 S, which I still own today, 22 years later. It was just 20 years old back then, today it is 42 years old.
I only bought my first classic car, a car with over 30 years on the clock, when I was already 43 years old. It was again a TVR, but a Tuscan V8 built in 1969. The next classic cars that came along over the years were mostly genuine classic cars, even if every now and then a youngtimer interrupted the series.
Over the years, a dozen and a half older cars came together that were at least 20 years old when they were purchased. Of course, most of them were sold again to buy the next object of desire. In total, I bought more youngtimers than classic cars and it took me a surprising number of years to work my way up to the "real" classic cars.
The majority of my classic cars came from the late sixties and seventies, which certainly has to do with the personal influence of films, car magazines and observations on the road.
But my "car story" is probably not that unusual; few classic car buyers are likely to start with very old cars that were built before their time, so to speak.
P.S. As we now know from the last "Question of the Week" , the average classic car buyer was/is 38 years old when they first buy a classic or modern classic car.
