My secret of how I used to find rare cars...

[Historybuff]

In the days before the internet (yeah, I remember steam locomotive and propellor driven transAtlantic flights too) the way I used to find cars
was to buy an ad in the Auto Trader picturing an old Ferrari or somesuch
and say "WANTED: OLD FERRARI" or somesuch and a guy would answer with pictures, usually with some rusty hunk of junk. But that was in the days when Ferraris were going up $1000 a week so my buyer would send me to the person's house (by surprise) with a cashier's check made out to his name and most times the guy would go for it (especially if his wife saw the check) . I would go unannounced so he couldn't hawk the car to his buddies first. The flaw in this was that the check would be made out to a set amount and sometimes the car was worse --like one Bizzarrini that was solid rust in Ohio--and if I didn't buy the car I didn't get a finders fee so I'd buy it anyhow.

I bought 3 Ferraris, a Bentley, a RR SCIII, a Jag, three Ghia 450SS and I forget what else..then the market collapsed around 1990

I wonder if anybody has found a Cobra, or Shelby this way. One problem is that some Auto Traders wouldn't take ads if you wanted to buy a car, only if you wanted to sell one.

Like to hear some stories if anybody has a better method of rooting out these long term never finished project cars...