Ask Joe Mechanic: Mecum Auction

This week, I am putting my turbocharging and supercharging series on hold again due to the significant importance of an automotive event that took place in Harrisburg this past weekend. The first Mecum Harrisburg collector car auction took place at the Harrisburg Farm Show Arena and I had the privilege of full access media credentials for the event. I attended a pre-auction event on Wednesday afternoon and evening. During this time I had a chance to talk with some of the Mecum personnel and view the vehicles that had arrived without fighting the crowd. This also gave me an opportunity took take a lot of photographs without difficulty. I will say that over the course of my time there, I took over 575 photographs.

            This was the first national and world-recognized auction company to come to the northeastern United States to hold a collector car auction. Yes, we have all attended events and auctions at Carlisle, Hershey, Atlantic City, Wildwood and others, but none of them compare to the size and quality of the vehicles that I witnessed at this event. I spent three days in Harrisburg, and I’ll tell you that if I had the money, I would have bought quite a number of vehicles. In fact, I need to retract a statement that I recently made in the Meet Joe Mechanic article. I stated that it is impossible for a car person to pick just one vehicle that he would like to have, but I could narrow it down to three or four. That is no longer true. Upon returning home and sitting down to work on this article, I wanted to pick twelve cars that I would have bought had I a seven or eight figure bank account (no decimal places), but I found that I had difficulty getting the list down to twenty.

            Those twenty vehicles I picked are featured in a special section of this week’s center glossy pages called Joe’s Picks with a short description and why I chose them. Some of these vehicles were sold, some were not, and that was only because I didn’t have money! Seriously, look through the photos and compare them with what your choices would be. I have featured about thirty or forty cars from each day, along with the price that they sold for.

Have fun and enjoy!  There is also a short article called Reflections on the First Mecum Harrisburg Auction in which I give some of my own observations.  Also featured is some information that I received in a post auction interview with a gentleman from Mecum Auctions Inc.