The problem I would have with that is that if you think back to the old(er) days of top gear; Quentin Willson used to do a slot on bargain cars, and he spawned the phrase "Top Gear on Sunday, sold on Monday". Given that fact, and also given that (loathe him or otherwse) Clarkson is hugely influential amongst those people without enough imagination to make up their own minds about anything, then I can see the real risk that when Top Gear lays claim to a car's future classic credentials they will kill it's genuine prospects dead.
The classic car world is kept turning by people that devote huge amounts of time and money to the running, fettling, repairing, restoring, showing and enjoying of cars, and in the vast majority of cases, the only way you will ever be prepared to do that for the long term is if you have a love for a car that transcends the money involved. Getting into one because TG says it's going to buy you a drink in six years time, and then deciding that you don't actually like the fact that it will need to be cared for in order to reward you in the future, means that it gets put back on the market fairly quickly, with another owner in the logbook, and in no better shape than before.
Classic owners, whether or not they admit it, also like to be a bit different from the norm. I have put a number of people in classics as daily drivers, and mostly they are run as company cars. If every Dave, Steve and Darren started smoking around in something the same, then those people would probably offload theirs, with the attitude that if they're not going to be exclusive, then they may as well do away with the hassle.
I know this is a generalisation, and you might think it somewhat bigoted, but in the UK particularly, we have a very strange attitude towards cars, and people can get very proprietorial about their own.
Don't get me wrong; in order to continue to rotate into all our futures and beyond, the world of the classic car needs to continually receive new settlers. However, to do the movement justice, and to really ensure its existence for the long term, owners need to have a love for their cars that is in most cases totally divorced from the financial realities of ownership. Most owners have as classics cars that they grew up with, or admired from afar when younger and they can now afford to realise the dreams of their youth.
Hands up all those that remember the classic car crash in the early nineties. It was the equivalent of the DotCom bubble, back when the internet was all fields. Investors with their eyes firmly on the prize began to scoop up anything with even the merest shadow of classic status on it, and quickly turned them around for huge profits. Quickly, the novelty wore off, city bonuses (they get blamed for a lot don't they) dried up, and cars that in May sold for £125,000 wouldn't shift for £30k in July. For several months, nothing moved off the auction rostrum. Dealers went belly up and so did auctioneers. Gradually, over a couple of years though, prices began to pick up again, and confidence slowly returned. The up side to this is that today we have many classics in the marketplace which a dozen years ago received hugely expensive restorations, and the current owners are the beneficiaries of that (and they bought their cars for fractions of those costs). Prices will never go that way again but, to get back to my original point, having 'the wrong sort of people' in the classic car game can be nearly as detrimental to it as having none at all.
It may be that you disagree with some or all of the above. However (and this is one of the main requirements for being a classic car owner), I don’t care what you think.
What was the question again?
PJ
) but in the meantime I will just enjoy a nice light hearted piece of entertainment.
