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Firstly, apologies for the double video post on Thursday and Friday... I need to get ahead of myself again so that when I have to spend all evening fixing a 'water tank' problem in the roof it doesn't impact my posts! I was intending to post about my three new TAG catalogues last night but that will now follow tomorrow, since something else turned up through all the mayhem last night...
For a long time I've wanted a classic 'resin' Formula 1. I know it's too small, I know I'll probably never wear it, but it's something that I feel belongs in my collection - and it's not so expensive that it brings me out in a sweat just thinking about it (what I'm going to do about the Monaco missing from my collection I don't know, I had high hopes for the recent quartz edition until I tried it on and it looked terribly girly).
So the other day I bought a couple of catalogues from eBay (post to follow soon), and hit on the idea of getting relatives to give me them for my birthday. I'm very hard to buy for so they jump on anything I can suggest, which means I don't have to fork out £45 for two fairly insubstantial (but very cool) twenty-five year old catalogues and everybody's happy! Similarly, my wife gave me £200 towards my blue Kirium (which has now been impounded for the next fortnight) and again, she's happy and my fund isn't quite so depleted as it would have been.
So when I spotted this on eBay on Thursday going for £105 I emailed a photo straight away to my wife asking if she wanted a suggestion for a Christmas present. In my head I thought it probably wouldn't go above £200, but I wasn't sure - especially as it's not the usual black/red combination that you tend to see most of the time and also because the condition looks pretty remarkable for it's age.
Yesterday morning it crept up to £111, and then by the afternoon it was on the move again, this time up to £135. I knew it would go up again, but still felt reasonably confident. The auction finished at 9:30pm and about an hour before it went up again to £150. It was about this point that I thought I ought to see what these have actually sold for in the past, because this was clearly a good one and so I should expect to pay the high end.
I was rather surprised to find that it was already trading higher than similar watches had sold for three months ago. Which then made me question if this was such a great deal after all. In my searches I also found a black/red/white dial F1 in good condition that had sold for just £99 not so long ago - and again this made me wonder if I wasn't being a bit hasty.
But still, this is clearly a more unusual colour combo, and I rather like the fact that it has the resin case and strap... and I don't know, I just wanted it I guess. But not at any cost. So I decided to bid at the last second with £167.95 and sure enough the watch went to another bidder for £172.95...
I'm still not sure if it was a mistake or not. I doubt there's many of these in this condition, but then it sold for sort of 40% more than the ones that had a history on eBay. Plus you look through the eBay listings for these (all the older F1s) and nearly all of them have knackered bezels and are being offered for £2-300, but then again you see the same ones over and over so they clearly aren't selling.
The other thing I was a bit wary of was the seller, who had been on eBay for 13 years (IIRC) and had 100% but all his feedback was private. Years ago I know someone who bought something off eBay and got scammed and their feedback was all private (and fake) so I'm more than a little wary of it.
Still, when the auction finished eBay suggested an alternative - which I didn't see before (I don't get how this happens, I think eBay filters results somehow) which was selling for 99p, so I bid on that one and I'm currently winning it at £1.40... no wait, it's £7.50 now, still I can live with that. Three days to go though so I'm sure it'll be up a lot higher than that by the end, and annoyingly at the time it finishes I will be driving to Wales so that's not ideal... though I guess I've got time to work out how to use the eBay app again.
The question is how much to bid, it's not in the same condition that this one is so I'm inclined to bid less... after all there's plenty of time until Christmas and who knows what might turn up in the meantime.
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