The ’87 560SL
Michael Minges
This month, I’m going to skip the profile and pontificate on a few subjects. Next month, I’m going to profile Bob Marchese, a volunteer for the Parkinson disease group and owner of a 380SL.
Last month, I went to one of my favorite places, Palm Springs, for a car auction. I had my standard great time. I did my auction parking stroll and met some nice people. As I’ve noted in the past, Palm Springs is a car enthusiast’s dream. It’s similar to here in that we have an influx of snowbirds as they do. The difference is the Palm Springs snowbirds are rich snowbirds. Instead of parking a Kia or a Toyota over the season, they park a Mercedes, Maserati, Bentley, Porsche, or some such in their winter homes.
Palm Springs is the number one source of used Rolls-Royces in the world and number two for new, world-wide Bentley sales. Finding really nice older cars with low miles isn’t much of a chore there. I bought my ’89 560SL in Hemet with 112,000 miles on it three years ago. It’s normative at every auction to have between eight to eleven older Mercedes SLs go across the block—Porsches, too, if you’re into them.
My brother and I between us have owned five Porsches. I didn’t like the national Porsche club and, to an extent, the local branch of the Mercedes Club of America has the same polarization problem. In the Porsche club, the 911 owners think they hung the moon and liquid cooled engine cars and 914s were dirt. My brother was at polar opposites of the peer group status spectrum. He owned a ’57 Speedster and a ’71 914. As he noted, they were both 80% VWs.
I encountered a similar polarization for the short time I was in the national Mercedes Club. The owners of the older cars think the newer cars are handcrafted by accountants and are nothing more than gadget boxes. I went to one outing with the MB club and quit the club shortly after. We went to a Chinese restaurant, and I encountered two problems: first, nobody talked to me including the club president, and second, of the 18 to 20 attendees, I was the only one eating with chopsticks. I don’t want to sound too snobby, but my father was a naval officer. I’ve lived in the Far East and Asian-rich places like the San Francisco Bay area. To me, eating at an Asian restaurant using silverware is just wrong. It’s like wearing a 10-gallon hat and fuzzy chaps to a dude ranch—it’s just not done.
Next month, I’ll profile Bob.