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Over the days, weeks and months going forward, look here to read and comment on automotive news events, ramblings, author guests blogs and other fun stuff related to the automotive enthusiast community.

I will get us started with a discussion I had with a friend of mine who is one of the 99% of people out there that really aren’t into cars. (We call them “normals”) Knowing I am a Mustang guy, she sent me a link about the 2013 Shelby prototype that sold at Barrett-Jackson a few days ago for over $300,000 dollars.

Just reading a brief clip on a news crawler without knowing the whole story might make us automotive junkies look more than a little bit crazy. But there is an interesting story to this and many other cars that sell for crazy prices at this now famous event.  Here is a news piece from our fellow bloggers at Autoblog.com on the actual auction:

http://www.autoblog.com/2012/01/21/barrett-jackson-2012-300-000-2013-shelby-gt500-prototype/

Yes the car was one of a kind and no, you can’t license it and drive it on the street, but the real value of the sale of the car was that the proceeds went to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.  A similar auction took place earlier in the evening for a 1964 Ford Fairlane. It sold for a million bucks, and while a very nice car with a wicked Roush 427 small block in it, this sale price was clearly many times over market value. The Fairlane was being sold to benefit wounded veterans through the Armed Forces Federation. The kicker was that the same car sold last autumn at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Las Vegas, and the buyer donated it back to Barrett-Jackson to re-sell to benefit the same charity again.

Charities are a big part of Barrett-Jackson these days, and while they tend to interrupt your regularly scheduled auction programming, they raise a lot of money for some very worthy causes.  I explained to my friend what the real deal was, and while the auction results do not even remotely reflect true market value, these charity auctions are a very very good thing.