Car collector 'field of dreams' heads to auction

It’s a car collector's dream: Hundreds of vehicles, stretching back to the 1950s and some brand-new, with fewer than 10 miles on the odometer, the original oil in the engine and the window sticker and protective plastic on the seats still in place. But they’re not all pristine, and only about 25 of the more than 500 cars were stored indoors over the years.

Later this month, thousands of collectors will descend on a small Nebraska town to see that this is not a dream but reality, albeit a highly unusual one. The man responsible for this rare mass of classic American iron is former car dealer Ray Lambrecht, now 95.

According to NPR, Lambrecht wouldn't sell the previous year's model after new models were introduced, and he also wouldn't sell trade-ins. So he stored them at his dealership or outside in a field, where some have been left for decades.

Lambrecht closed his dealership, Lambrecht Chevrolet in the tiny town of Pierce, in 1996 but is just now getting around to selling the cars he collected over the years via his unorthodox business practice. The cars stored inside include a 1978 Chevrolet Corvette Indy pace car, a 1966 Chevy Bel Air and a 1964 Impala.

“If you wipe away the dirt, [the cars are] shiny underneath,” said Yvette VanDerBrink, the auctioneer selling Lambrecht’s collection. The cars and trucks that sat outside for decades didn’t fare so well: A Chevy Deluxe from the 1950s has a 20-foot tree limb growing out of the bumper.

That won’t deter collectors. Even some of the rusted cars are still valuable because there are so few around. But the biggest draw is the brand-new old cars stored inside. “I would not be surprised to see them break six figures,” Jim Pickering, editor of American Car Collector, told NPR. “These are cars that were basically taken from the dealer and shoved out back and have been sitting ever since they were brand-new.”

While the car collection is one of a kind, the auction will also be unusual. “We're not washing them, and we're not getting them running," VanDerBrink said. A website VanDerBrink created that catalogues the cars has garnered more than 1 million views. There's also a YouTube video.

VanDerBrink expects as many as 10,000 collectors will make the trip to Pierce, a town of about 1,700, for the auction Sept. 28-29. “We've had calls from China, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Germany, all over the world,” she said.

VanDerBrink added that some Pierce residents are “shocked” at the interest the cars have generated. “To one person that isn't familiar with the hobby of collecting cars, you might look out there and say, 'That looks like a bunch of junk to me.' But to a collector, it's a field of dreams.”

[Source: NPR]

Source: MSN