I reckon the next mass-market collectable will be the early Mazda MX-5 – and the other is a first-year Toyota Prius

Stock prices have plummeted and the car companies are in hot water. But that does not mean it’s all doom and gloom for petrolheads. A recession is a good time to buy a car, if you follow your head… and even sometimes your heart.

I don’t know anything about stocks and I always feel totally left out when the topic comes up. Yet I have to quietly smile when I realise all I’ve done with cars is just buy the ones I like, on the basis that if I like ’em, other car people will probably like ’em too.

When I bought my McLaren F1, it was the most money I’d ever spent on an automobile in my life before or since. My McLaren was a ’94. I purchased it in ’98 and it was 0,000. It was almost the price it was new, just a little bit cheaper. I talked to people and I talked to my brother and I said, ‘I know it’s stupid, alright… I’ll buy it!’ I’ve had stocks lose money, I’ve had everything else lose money; the only thing that’s gone up in value is my McLaren.

Whether you have a TR3 or a McLaren, if you like it and it has some sort of pedigree, the chance is other people will like it too, and it’s actually a better investment because you can use it. Certificates aren’t much fun. You could maybe wallpaper something with them or look at the intricate little detail and the etchings, but if you buy a car and pay too much for it – oh well, at least you can drive it, enjoy it and have fun with it!

This is an excellent time to buy because it separates the real enthusiasts from the ‘phoney baloney’ people. The speculators now will cut and run, just as they did in the early ’90s. There was that huge boom in the late ’80s where anything that was red and had Ferrari on it was going for hundreds of thousands of dollars over what it was worth. Then prices levelled out and just now they’re creeping up. Daytonas were reasonable for a while, they went crazy, and who knows, they might become reasonable again.

The thing I tell people is that you always want to try and buy anything pre-1980, because if you buy yourself a 10-year-old Ferrari there’s almost nobody that can work on it other than a Ferrari authorised dealer. New cars are becoming more and more like DVD players – when they break, you just get another. They are impossible for even the extremely talented ‘do it yourselfer’ to repair. The nice thing about older cars is they were built by hand and hands haven’t changed much.

What’s more, there no guarantee the dealer knows what he’s doing. I remember when I first got my Dodge Viper and I went back to a dealer for the oil change. The handbook said to use Mobil One, so I bought a case of Mobil One and went to the dealer.

I knew I was in trouble because the service manager was wearing a black turtle-neck with a medallion. I said, ‘Listen, I wanna get my oil changed. I wanna use the synthetic.’ And he said, ‘You don’t have to, it’s not necessary, we can put in regular 20/50.’ I said, ‘No, I gotta case of Mobil One in the trunk there.’ He says, ‘OK, we’ll put that in for ya.’

I go pick up the car the next day and open the trunk and say ‘Oh… where’s the rest of the oil?’ I pull the dipstick and oil’s coming out the top of the tube! Never again…

When I was a teenager, all the magazines said ‘Mustangs are nice, but they’ll never be collectable because they made one million of them in the first year-and-a-half so there’ll always be too many around.’ That’s precisely the reason they are collectable now, because so many people had them and yearn to have them again.

With that in mind, I reckon the next mass-market collectable will be the early Mazda MX-5. They were simple, easy to work on; they were twin cam, they were true sports cars like the Lotus Elan. If you buy yourself a mid-’90s MX-5 right now I would almost guarantee it will only go up because of its desirability factor.

The other car I think will be collectable is a first-year Toyota Prius… It’s not particularly fast but it brings back a lot of memories of people gawking, waving and asking, what kind of car is that?

The flaw in this argument is that I will never make money out of my cars. I’d never sell the McLaren, for instance. And if I did it would only be after I’d sold my house and all my belongings. So maybe you should disregard this whole column!