This weekend, the Monterey Classic Bike Auction will be held in conjunction with the U.S. Grand Prix at Laguna Seca. After all, if you have a huge crowd of motorcycle enthusiasts all revved up and gathered together, why not give them a chance to spend a little money and buy the bike of their dreams? The lineup is pretty amazing as we’ve mentioned before, including the Ducati MotoGP bike of Loris Capirossi, but there’s lots of other bikes, too.
Next weekend, AMA Vintage Days will be held at the Mid Ohio race course and on Saturday, there will be an auction there, as well. This one will be run by J. Wood and Company, the same auction house that had the recent auction for the Barr Ashcraft Estate, which we wrote about earlier. No long involved registrations required, just show up with a bike on Friday and you can auction it off on Saturday.
Daytona Bike Week has an auction and it looks like more race weekends are getting one of their own to get a bit of the action. Must be lots of people watched the Barrett Jackson craziness on TV or in person and said, “Hey, we can do that.”
Bonhams over in the U.K. has been seling off all sorts of very cool motorcycle memorabilia for a very long time, recently including the Matchless Motorcycles trademark and they’ll soon have Jim Redman’s Honda RC164.
If you go to an auction, take your brain with you and leave your emotions at home, unless you have a really big checkbook, then just do whatever you want. It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy, heck, that’s what those auction houses are supposed to do, get everyone chasing after each motorcycle like it’s the last one on earth, get a little competitive pride involved and next thing you know, you have a really expensive bike to take home with you, and with luck, it might even run!
Some auctions are a bit more laid back, a small crowd shows up, no one bids much, and if you know what you’re doing and keep yourself from grinning too much you might get a real prize for very little money, and it’s that dream, kind of like hitting the Powerball jackpot, that keeps so many coming back because this time they might get lucky.
Most of us have something in the back of our minds, we keep an eye open for a certain bike, we scan the ebay listings, read the classifieds, hoping it will show up and that’s when an aution is dicey, you see it, you get to walk up close and examine it, you imagine riding it on a nice summer evening and who is that guy to bid against you? It’s yours! But that’s OK. Sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do. Buy it, ride it, enjoy it.