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A few of us spent some time at Barrett Jackson on Saturday. It wasn’t as fun as I expected. There were three areas to see the cars: the staging area, auction stage and “salon,” where cars went after going across the stage. The salon also held all the vendors including our friends at Lamborghini of Las Vegas.

The three areas were too spread out, requiring too much walking. I heard they will fix that next year with a new arrangement. I was also surprised at the size of the crowd. It was small. There seemed to be a lot of buyers (good for the show), but not many spectators. I suppose the upside to that was the ease of getting a decent seat.

My friend and I were at the show primarily to see Tom Tjaarda action off his personal Pantera. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really a personal car with history, it was simply a car he recently purchased, cleaned up, and added some “updates” to. The updates were new bumpers, tail lights and side markers. I certainly don’t begrudge him for flipping a car. If anyone should make some money from the Pantera brand it should be Mr. Tjaarda. I was surprised to see it cross the block for $100,000. Always good to see a Pantera fetch a good price.

I was told that numbers were way down, and many cars were selling under expectations despite BJ claiming that they proved the doom-and-gloom crowd wrong.

I did learn something at the show: when I am surrounded by hundreds of perfect cars, it is hard for anything to stand out. When everything is special, nothing is special. Once I got home, I was surprised at how few pictures I took. It doesn’t help that I like exotics, something always in short supply at Barrett Jackson.

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