This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol.7. To read the full story, purchase your copy of the magazine here.
Martin Gruss bought his first car at age 16, investing his bar mitzvah money in a black-over-red MG MGA, a foundational British roadster with a long hood, swoopy fenders, two seats, and a small trunk. “I loved the initials MG because they’re my initials,” says Gruss, now 81. This acquisition initiated an obsession: “Ever since then, I’ve been driving sports cars. And when I got older and was financially able, I started buying the cars that I liked and I wanted to drive,” fantastic cars that had imprinted on his younger, midcentury self. “Nostalgia. That’s what it’s all about,” he says.
Gruss, a pioneering businessman and philanthropist who divides his time between Palm Beach and Southampton, now has about 30 cars in his collection. The majority are stored in a private garage, where they’re managed by a full-time mechanic. His cache includes top-tier vehicles such as a Ferrari 250 Europa Coupe, a Ferrari 365 GTB/4, a Jaguar XK 120, a Bentley Continental S1 Coupe, and a Bugatti Type 57 Vanvooren.
But his first blue-chip purchase was a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, a futuristic coupe derived from a 1950s race car, and nicknamed for its span-like doors, which open upward from hinges in the roof. Fewer than 1,500 were made. Gruss’s is an even rarer bird, one of only 29 lightweight aluminum alloy cars, produced for racing teams. “It turned out to be a great investment,” says Gruss. This is an understatement. A derelict, junkyard-found Alloy Bodied Gullwing recently sold for over $9 million. Gruss doesn’t drive the car much. Not because it’s too valuable, or because the corporeal acrobatics required to clamber into the driver’s seat are so extreme that the steering wheel must be folded down first. He doesn’t drive it because it’s in Florida, and it lacks a vital feature.
Martin Gruss drives his 1958 Jaguar XK150 S.
“It doesn’t have air conditioning,” Gruss says. “It doesn’t even have windows that roll up and down.” He takes similar issue with other cars in his collection. He doesn’t drive his 1957 Ford Thunderbird because it lacks A/C. He avoids his Jaguar XKE convertible because he doesn’t “take sun anymore.” He passes over many of his cars because they’re too big or lack an automatic transmission, making chores of parking and traffic. He’s even considering deaccessioning some of these vehicles.
Instead, Gruss regularly drives his far more modern Ferrari 599 GTB, or his Bentley Continental GT, 21st-century models laden with creature comforts, up to and including power-ventilated and massaging seats. In fact, he and his wife, Audrey—the popular hostess, philanthropist, and founder of the Hope for Depression Research Foundation—each have a contemporary Bentley Continental, though if they go out together, they take his. “Mrs. Gruss doesn’t let me drive her car,” he says, laughing. “She knows how I drive.”
Gruss’s driving, purchasing, and selling habits align with many larger trends in the collector car world. The vintage vehicle market has, like much in American economic and popular culture, long been dominated by the Baby Boomers. These folks, the eldest of whom are now entering their 80s, fetishized the cars of their 1950s and ’60s-era youth. When they could afford it, that’s what they purchased.
A detail of a 1948 MG TC in Gruss’s collection.
The inordinate size and wealth of this generation caused the prices of these vehicles—especially the most desirable “blue chip” ones like those in Gruss’s collection—to spike in recent decades. But despite the Boomers’ perseverant vivacity, all generational trends have a terminus. People age. Demand declines. Markets shift.
Today, the parameters of what’s considered highly collectible are expanding. “Our Blue-Chip Index is static over the past 12 months,” says Brian Rabold, vice president of automotive intelligence at Hagerty, the world’s largest insurer of collectible cars. This registry tracks the prices of 25 highly sought-after post-war cars, and its flatlining presages that market’s first significant downturn (save the pandemic). Hagerty’s “Ferrari Index,” which covers a similar number and era of the Italian sports car maker’s most alluring cars, shows even greater declines. “It’s down 3% for the year.”
Rabold explains these shifts as demographic. “While there are still collectors who are seeking out these vehicles, change is inevitable,” he says. “Ten years from now,” he adds euphemistically, “those collectors will probably not be adding to their collections.”
Simultaneously, Gen Xers and Millennials are achieving the financial security they need to purchase collectible cars. An infrastructure for buying quality older cars, through internet auction platforms like BringATrailer or CarsAndBids, has provided them with clickable means for disposing of their disposable income. And the depredations of the pandemic caused them to confront the intersection of desire and mortality.
The nose of a1958 JAGUAR XK150 S, from Gruss’s collection.
“It’s the YOLO effect,” Rabold says. “Like, I’ve always wanted this car, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment. Then, all of a sudden, it’s like, I may not get another moment.”
These new buyers, however, are interested in reclaiming nostalgia from a different era: cars from the decades preceding, and immediately following, the end of the 20th century. “I’m limited in my floor space, so I have to be very conscious of what I bring in, in terms of what’s going to give me a fast turnaround,” says Gaston Rossato, owner of The Barn Miami, a venerable classic car dealership in South Florida. “We are getting a little heavier on the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s cars now, that’s for sure.”
Notably, younger collectors are seeking a different experience of classic-car ownership. Having grown up in an era in which advances in technology and manufacturing provided cars with more robust reliability and luxury appointments, they’re not seduced by a romantic notion that vintage vehicles should be finicky and difficult.
[Lead image: a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette, from the collection of Martin Gruss.]