It starts with the smell – moth balls and bad motor oil. The metallic taste of rust in the air dances with dust, floating around in sunbeams that have snuck in through cracks in the wood. You hesitate to touch the worn leather, but you do anyway. Fifty years of insect wings and cobwebs burst into the air at the slight depression, and you are forced to take a step back to breathe clean breaths, and, more importantly, to look at the treasure you have found.
Despite the name this is not how the story of every Barn Find, the latest craze in the automobile world, begins. Of the thousands of vintage automobiles popping up, varnished in dust and spider webs, as many are found in barns as in garages, under tarps, in tents and off in somewhere in the backyard, left to rot. The barn find refers to cars that have been neglected for a long time, and show up in all a matter of strange places and various degrees of decomposition.
Despite its humble origins, the barn find speaks to many changing elements about automobile culture. It brings up the unfortunate point that early mass production automobiles are getting old. It is no longer the wooden spoked wheels of Model Ts sticking out from under the highlighter blue Home Depot tarps, but rather, the wide white walls of the 1930s Packards, the dog dish hub caps of the earliest Pony Cars. The turnover of car culture is happening, and impossible to ignore.
The barn find culture, however, brings up a much more immediate question. In the wake of increasingly endangered automobiles enthusiasts are forced to ask themselves, preserve or restore? It’s a far more complicated question than surface value would lead one to believe. For the cars that have been peacefully hibernating for 40, 50, 60 years, such as the 1967 Ferrari 330 GTS, which spent 45 years in a garage in Pennsylvania, originality is very real. According to some, even wiping the dust off of these cars is taking away something special, something we can’t just go back to 1967 to get.
Last year that particular Ferrari sold for $2.1 million dollars in a Gooding and Company sale in Scottsdale, Arizona. Many believe the price is warranted, and that, despite the engine fire which led to the car’s original benching in 1969, this Ferrari is worth more in its current state, untouched for nearly five decades, than it would be restored. Others don’t agree. For many, the aesthetic value of a spruced up and shiny new vintage car is a driving reason to keep on cleaning.
Some, however, are more inclined towards skepticism. There is always the inquiry of originality. In the world of vintage racecars, especially, the question of what is truly original is hard to answer. The constant replacing of parts – and the more successful a racecar was, the more parts it had replaced, left many cars with nothing original except the VIN number. In some instances, the VIN plates from other cars had been bought and put into place, to fool the industry and capitalize on the hopeful.
It is not a question to answer overnight – whether to preserve or restore. There are compelling and true arguments for both sides. Restored cars look better, they drive safer, they don’t fall apart, quite as much, at every seam. But preserved cars own their history, they have rubber that touched racetracks, leather that held the bottoms of famous movie stars, the original bullet holes from gangster shoot outs.
In the fairest sense, the only way to answer the question is on a car by car and owner by owner basis. We may never all agree on what cars may be born anew and what cars may live out the rest of their lives as relics. But for now, as always, the decision lies with whoever has the car, and the cash.