It's hard to figure the reasons for these Australian cars to fetch the sort of money they do. I tend to think a lot of it is due to patriotism and sentiments for Australian cars. I also think that the comparably low cost of spares has a bit to do with it as well. Compare this with spare parts prices for our 116's and 107's and this may well provide an additional clue. I also think, and dare I say it, the untimely death of Peter Brock may have created some form of, shall we call it, vacuum ? BTW, I can't see any pics of the Director model. Regards Styria
Styria there is one main reason for these and the more recent prices mate.
Emotion, lack of financial foresight and access to housing equity.
I'll give you an example,
A company I had also ran a small specialised workshop in suburban Melbourne.
We had a client who owned 3 Blue meanie VK Brock commodores who came to us and said can you build a replica for me.
And as the requirements unfolded I suggested that it not be a faithfull copy but utilise later model parts from Chevrolet as the guy already owned a number of US Chevs.
He said yes and we built him a VK Blue meanie brock copy with a Corvette driveline, working AC and a host of other modern goodies.
the Cost was (Without paint and VK shell supplied) 14k and he liked it so much it became his daily driver replacing the C5 vette he normally drove.
He also sold his genuine Brock commodores and made a mint next comissioning an XY GTHO replica which we did from start to finish for under 30k.
We were chatting shortly after he'd sold the brocks and mentioned that 2 or the 3 had been sold to guys that he felt couldnt afford them and on further discussion it turned out that they had been bought for exorbitant sums by guys who then went on to get very deep in debt to live their dream.
I know of one of these cars that came up for sale a few years ago and sold for nearly 1/3rd of what the guy paid, another that was "Stolen" and burnt out under suspicious circumstances and the third he bought back for a fair whack under the original sale price when the guy had lost his house, his family etc and he later went on to have issues regarding the sale with the sheriffs office requiring a further payment to retain the Car.
Not so much an issue with the GTHO's as they were fetching scary numbers heading towards 750 thou and above but the Holdens seemed to cause a lot of misery during the muscle car madness.
Tony