For all you Barrett-Jackson fans... fresh from today's autoextremist.com:
From the "Revenge of the Twerps" File, or is it the "A**holes R Us" File? Barrett-Jackson pulled collector car expert Keith Martin's media credential before the auction for a series of alleged transgressions, according to a report by Bob Gritzinger, in AutoWeek. B-J operatives took Martin's credential for allegedly telling people in the auction company media center to leave Barrett-Jackson and attend one of the competing auctions in the area. "I never said a negative word about Barrett-Jackson," said Martin to Autoweek. "He can come and view the auction any time he wants," said Barrett-Jackson president and CEO Craig Jackson (aka Gordon Gekko, the King of the Muscle Car Boom), in a post-auction week interview with AutoWeek. "But he can't sit in our media center and badmouth us while he's eating our food." Jackson said Martin's comments were heard by half a dozen people in the media center - including his company's director of public relations, Jennifer Ziegler. Ziegler did not return AutoWeek's calls seeking comment. According to Jackson's clearly delusional thinking, Martin had a "vendetta" against Barrett-Jackson because he had been fired two weeks earlier from his role as a commentator on Speed Channel's live coverage of Barrett-Jackson. Jackson said Martin was dropped from Speed for inaccuracies in his commentary during the broadcasts, specifically in comments on muscle cars, and because of columns published in Martin's magazine, Sports Car Market, suggesting that the muscle car boom was losing steam and warning readers of questionable bidding practices at auctions. (Which from where we sit, immediately imbues Martin with even more credibility than he already had.) Rick Miner, a Speed Channel senior vice president, told AutoWeek that Martin was dropped from the Barrett-Jackson lineup because his knowledge of sports cars was becoming less "germane" in the muscle car-dominated auction setting, and because of the columns. (In other words, Speed Channel had thoroughly abandoned any shred of the objectivity they had left and marched to the cadence of Crag Jackson's dictation.) Martin, who was attending the auction in his role as publisher of Sports Car Market and as a correspondent for the New York Times, told AutoWeek that none of the allegations were true. He said no one ever complained about the accuracy of his auction commentaries "in 10 years of working for them." Martin said only two or three people were in the media center at any one time when he was there, and that he never badmouthed Barrett-Jackson or told attendees to go elsewhere. Others who were with Martin at the auction backed up the writer's story to AutoWeek. "It didn't happen while I was there, and I was with him virtually the entire day," said one attendee who asked not to be identified. If this incident doesn't encapsulate the B-J mindset perfectly, we don't know what will. Craig Jackson will stop at nothing to hype his Greed-fest, and he won't let anyone or anything stand in the way of his rampant orchestration of the sky-high prices there - especially the muscle car prices. It is an accepted fact now that in collector car circles there are two price points: The B-J price, which is inflated anywhere from 20 to 100 percent, and the "real" price - one that hasn't been boosted to high heaven by Jackson's Greed Posse. The Muscle Car Bubble? It's already here, folks.
Our Autoextremist Quote of the Week goes to Keith Martin, the only guy in the collector car hobby (other than us) who deigns to call out the B-J for hyping the collector muscle car prices to extremes. "They can fire me (from Speed) for not liking what I write, but they are accusing me of things that are simply untrue," said Martin to AutoWeek. "It's the accusations that are simply not true that I take issue with." Right on, Keith - and you're our Honorary Autoextremist of the Week too.
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