Not too long ago, there was an H Production VW Scirocco for sale on Bring a Trailer. I briefly flirted with the idea of bringing it home and scrapping most of my motorsports plans for the year to make a bid for the Runoffs at Indy. The day that the auction was set to end, I did a bunch of “research” by pestering a friend who was building a Production class VW race car with questions and watching videos from last year’s Runoffs at Road America.
But in the end, I decided not to buy the car.
In small (very small) pockets of the internet, there were discussions about the ultimate hammer price of the car — a seemingly cheap 12 grand for a car that finished 4th at the Runoffs last year. Did the seller take a bath on the sale of the car? Did no one want a competitive H Production race car that had tens of thousands of dollars of development work put into it?
I’m inclined to believe that the car really did sell for what it was worth. I suspect the low selling price was low for the same reason why I decided not to pull the trigger on the car. As much as I love the idea of racing a Production class race car, the overwhelming majority of the cars are old and the competition, outside of the big race weekends, is pretty thin.
A street car can be used as transportation, so anything that runs and can be legally licensed for road use has intrinsic value that few people would deny. A race car doesn’t have that — its value is purely a social construct. A race car’s value is defined strictly by the social capital bestowed upon it via the rule book and the size of the of the social circle that supports it — its fellow competitors. A car from an unpopular race class is inherently worth less.
So you can buy a Runoffs Top 5 H Production race car for 12 grand, but that amount of money wouldn’t come close to buying a Runoffs Top 5 Spec Miata.
In the end, it just made more sense for me to stick with one of the popular classes if I were to buy a race car. If the goal is to do lots of close racing, I’d rather have a slow Spec Miata than a fast H Production race car. Even if it means that I’d never have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to the top 10 at the Runoffs, let alone the podium.
At the end of the auction, I scrolled through the comments to see who had won the car. The new owner didn’t have plans to compete in SCCA racing; instead, he planned to take the car vintage racing. (Insert joke here about how Production class racing is vintage racing.) How ironic, I thought. The ultimate value of the car lay not in its modern day capability as a championship winner, but its symbolism as a relic of a bygone age.