Southern UK 240Z needed for Classic & Sports Car Photo Shoot SOON please!!

[Motornoter]

Hi all
I write the Buying Guide every month in Classic & Sports Car and I urgently need to find a 240Z to be photographed for the next Buying Guide. It really needs to be photographed one day next week - sorry about the short notice, it's entirely my fault, I've been flat out getting three cars MoT'd for the Vintage at Goodwood event at the weekend and this one has crept up on me. Please help!
Ideally we need a bright-coloured car, somewhere within 50 miles of Oxford, but with the short notice and rarity of standard spec 240Zs these days we can cast the net a bit wider if necessary...
The car should be as standard-looking as possible, but doesn't have to be concours, just a good representative example.
Please email me on MMcKays (at) aol (dot) com or call 07711 901811 if you can help.
Classic & Sports Car will give you a CD of the photos and a couple of copies of the mag afterwards and reimburse petrol costs, which is much more than you'll get out of most car magazines, as well as the kudos of having your car in the best classic car magazine!
By the way I'd also welcome leads on who can give me the best advice and info on buying - I don't want to see my article slated afterwards on this forum for having mistakes in it!
Thanks - I look forward to hearing from you...
Malcolm McKay

 

[STEVE BURNS]

In hand and being arranged

 

[martinmac]

40 minutes Steve, you are on fire at the moment.

 

[Motornoter]

Thanks, Steve

I can honestly say that in 20 years working on car mags I have never had a faster response from a club in finding a car for a photo shoot - and that includes many more plentiful cars than 240Zs!

Big thanks to all - (and to Duncan Pearcey at Z Farm who also came up with some good suggestions in response to this post).

Well done Z Club!

Malcolm

 

[martinmac]

I see there is space in the club directory for a link Macolm.

 

[mattbibbey]

Make sure Classic & Sports car magazine tell everyone ALL 240Z's are worth £20,000!! errrr, unlike mine. lol

 

[rallymanDP]

But seriously, Matt, I have PM'd this Journalist to tell him that the Price Guides in all the Magazines are well out of synch.

We get at least a handful of calls every month expecting to buy a mint RHD 240Z for around £10k.

Dream on.......

 

[Motornoter]

Thanks guys
Yes, we had woken up to the increased prices! I keep thinking back to the scruffy 240Z at the back of an abandoned garage in Crieff, Scotland, that I could've had for a song... Mind you, that was about 27 years ago now!
Martinmac, yes, good call - I've asked the guys in the office and they tell me they can't do anything with their present antiquated website, but when the new one goes on stream soon, they'll do it.
Cheers
Malcolm

 

[mattbibbey]

Yeah, rallyman, I had meant that as a joke but now I see. It's important because the guides usually say Con.1= £9000..... well if you find one for that I'll eat several top hats! A quick tinterweb search of 240Z's for sale is rather revealing. But the magazines surely can't just double the price on the guide? Can they?

 

[rallymanDP]

The Mags have been out of touch for a long time, Matt. I don't know where & how they arrive at some of their Prices - I suspect that they have just repeated the same old stuff without doing any work in respect of updating their figures for a good while.

Just by way of an example, the last three mint condition 240Z's we have sold have gone for an average of just over £21k each ...... but I repeat that they were really superb condition cars which had a lot of work involved.

Anyway, I hope that gives you some inspiration !

 

[SeanDezart]

There aren't enough Zs sold and not publicly in auctions etc for them to have a realistic grasp of the facts.

Same problem over here - the cars are too rare and most good ones are sold off the airwaves.

 

[mattbibbey]

I'm not all that bothered really... lol. I've no intention of selling mine but it would be good if the information surrounding the model was accurate. It is clearly appretiating and doing so rather quickly! I know of one being sold to a friend of a chap I met and he'll be getting around £28K I'm sure he said!

I'm really looking forward to the article. 240Z is a really unknown (largely) and under-rated car!

 

[mattbibbey]

Just thought, I live 7 miles from oxford and while my 240Z isn't up to a photo shoot but it'd be quite cool to see it. Where are you thinking of doing the shoot?

 

[FAST EDDIE]

im just outside winchester if it helps!

 

[STEVE BURNS]

Shoot is being done on Thursday this week and featuring Robin Smiths 240Z

 

[Motornoter]

Ah, sorry Matt, first time I've checked in since the 19th so didn't see your post - you would have been welcome to join us. We actually did the shoot on Friday (last minute change because of the weather - thanks very much to Robin for putting his work on hold and changing dates for us) - went very well and it was a great pleasure to get behind the wheel of a Z again.
Now need to make sure I get the facts right - the Buying Guide will be out in Classic & Sports Car's November issue, on sale beginning of Oct...
Malcolm

 

[Albrecht]

I see that the October 2010 issue of C&SC has a 'NEXT MONTH' page advertising the delights of the November issue.

The forthcoming "Datsun 240Z Buyer's Guide" is illustrated with a photo of a north American market RLS30 model 'Datsun 260Z'........

Business as usual, then.

 

[malcolmpaul]

Practical Classics recently did an article on classics worth saving and one of the cars was a 240Z. They put a value of £10,000 to £15000, but the price guide at the rear of the mag for condition 1 is £9000. I sent them an e mail saying I thought it was about time they upgraded this and, guess what, didn't even have the courtesy to acknowledge it.

 

[Motornoter]

Ha ha well spotted, Albrecht! We need people like you to keep us on our toes... And I'd like to say I had nothing to do with the selection of that photo, I only saw it after you pointed it out.
But to be fair to the guys on the picture desk, the Buying Guide is actually covering 240Z, 260Z and US-market 280Z, so it was OK to use that pic - I guess they just said 240Z in the line below because it fitted better than listing all three...
By the way, I came close to buying myself a 240Z when preparing this article - spotted a yellow 1973 for sale in Pennsylvania, fair condition with some rust, one lady owner from new (she bought it when she was 24, now she's 61...), full history, some new parts, 115,000 miles, $800... Unfortunately some guy drove straight down from New York with a trailer and took it away for the asking price, I couldn't compete with that... I don't suppose another opportunity like that one will come up again for a while, but I'll keep watching!
MalcolmPaul - sorry to hear you had that experience with Practical Classics. I don't know the guys there but I happen to know who compiles the Price Guide for them, so I'll pass your comments direct to him...
Malcolm

 

[Albrecht]

But to be fair to the guys on the picture desk, the Buying Guide is actually covering 240Z, 260Z and US-market 280Z, so it was OK to use that pic - I guess they just said 240Z in the line below because it fitted better than listing all three...

May I ask, why these three models in particular?

First of all, Nissan launched the S30-series as a range of models for different Export markets, and variants for its own domestic market. The first generation Z was most certainly not a simple progression from '240Z' to '260Z' to '280Z'.....

The terms '240Z' and '260Z' are almost meaningless unless their market / variant identities are also taken into account. For example, an early UK, Australian or NZ market RHD 'HS30' model is really quite a different car in detail and driving character than a north American market 'HLS30', and in the '260Z' models the differences became even greater. Most of these 'Buying Guide' type features - shallow by their very nature - usually throw all these differences into a pot and stir until thoroughly mixed. The resulting soup is neither appetising nor educationally nutritious.

We always seem to get fed the line that the Z was "made / designed for the USA", when in fact great pains were taken to design a series of models at launch that would cater for many different markets and both LHD and RHD configurations. However, the natural design concession built into the car was biased toward the RHD-oriented origin of most of the mechanicals and the fact that Japan is an RHD market. Sales figures ( only possible to view in retrospect ) do not form any proof of where a car was designed "for"....

And - stop me if you've heard this one before - WHY only the '240Z', '260Z' and '280Z' models? WHERE are the Japanese domestic models? Are they going to be relegated once again to a small sidebar headed "Here's some other models that they made but we don't know anything much about them and anyway they are all only two litres and they never sold very many of them and our readers won't know any different so why bother"?

You can't write a straight faced article about a Japanese car without giving a full and equal mention to the Japanese market models. For a UK based, UK published classic car magazine to ignore the Japanese market models of a Japanese designed, engineered and manufactured car, and at the same time spotlight a model like the 'Datsun 280Z' - only sold in north America - is fairly bizarre. I don't see how a 'Buying Guide' written in the UK can give accurate data ( prices, parts availability etc etc ) for both UK and USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, France, Belgium, Germany and any other original export territories and hope to be accurate, so why pretend? Whenever I've seen such 'Buying Guide' articles in UK press they have a natural bias to the UK market, so why include north American market models in the first place?

I can't think of many other cars that have had so much bad data and misinformed opinion written about them as the S30-series Z has. New articles often seem to simply copy and compound the mistakes of previous articles, and we go around in circles.

Is this article going to improve on that?