For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a big fan of the ’63 split-window Corvette. There are plenty of cars I admire and plenty I’d love to own, but the split-window has always been one of those cars that just does it for me. And this one might be about as good a combination as I’ve seen.

Sebring Silver over red is just stunning, and then you get the 340-hp L76 327, four-speed manual and Positraction. It was refurbished around 2009, but importantly it still has its numbers-matching engine, with both the engine pad and trim tag certified by Al Grenning. It also earned NCRS Top Flight awards in both 2024 and 2025, so there’s plenty here beyond simply looking beautiful.

What I particularly like is that it hasn’t been turned into another restomod. I understand why people do it, and there are some fantastic ones out there, but a split-window this good doesn’t need reinventing. The design is the reason I fell in love with these cars in the first place.

My only gripe is one I seem to have far too often with great cars: the current owner bought it in 2024 and has added approximately 20 miles. I know it has been collecting NCRS awards, but come on, someone please buy this thing and actually drive it.

Here’s one you really don’t see very often. This is a 1980 Vauxhall Chevette 2300 HS, and if you’re wondering why an old Chevette is already at £27,250, there’s a very good reason.

Vauxhall wanted to go rallying and take on the Ford Escort, but Group 4 rules meant it first had to build 400 road cars. So rather than just sticking some stripes on a regular Chevette, it gave the HS a 2.3-litre 16-valve engine, five-speed Getrag gearbox and 135hp. The rally cars went on to win the British Open Rally Championship for Drivers in 1979 and the Manufacturers title in 1981.

This one has clearly had some love over the years. The previous owner had it from 1992 and carried out a major restoration, while the current owner has continued spending money in the right places. Bilstein shocks, Wilwood four-pot front brakes, rebuilt rear axle and diff, stainless exhaust, and just last month it had an oil service and new timing belt. It has covered just over 60,000 miles and, most importantly for me, still looks exactly like a Chevette HS should. Starfire Silver, red stripes and an interior with enough tartan to make sure nobody mistakes it for anything built this century.

Only 400 were built in the first place, and today just 89 are licensed for UK roads, with another 70 on SORN. The Market says this is the first one they’ve ever had, which after the number of cars that have passed through there probably tells you more about the rarity than anything else.

The estimate is £27,000 to £32,000, bidding is already at £27,250 and the reserve has been met, so somebody is definitely taking it home tomorrow.

And for anyone in the US thinking this would be a much more interesting thing to own than another modern performance car, it’s old enough to import. Put the purchase price into our TDV Import Calculator and you can work out what shipping, duty and the rest would bring the real landed cost to before you start bidding.

This one brings back some good memories for me. I had an Audi 4000 back in the day, although mine certainly wasn't as nice as this one, and seeing that wonderfully simple, boxy shape again immediately took me back. There was something about Audis from this era that just felt different, and the five-cylinder engine and Quattro system made the 4000 CS particularly special.

This 1986 example has just 66k miles, a five-speed manual and, remarkably, appears to be completely unmodified. Zermatt Silver over black leather suits it perfectly, and you get all the great period stuff including heated seats, locking front and rear differentials and those tiny 14-inch wheels. It's not perfect, with some scratches and dings, interior wear and some corrosion on the exhaust, but personally I'd rather see an honest 40-year-old car like this than one that's been messed around with.

There's also an interesting bit of auction history here. This very car sold on Cars & Bids in 2022 for $18,000, and according to the seller it has since spent most of its time stored as part of a collection and driven very little. Now it's back on the same platform, sitting at $8,000 and hopefully selling today.

The comments are almost as enjoyable as the car, with several people telling stories about owning one in high school, driving them through ridiculous snowstorms and getting hooked on Audi because of them. I completely understand it.

Sometimes an auction isn't about a Ferrari or Porsche doing a huge number. It's an old Audi that suddenly reminds you why you got into cars in the first place.

Yesterday I told you GoAskSam could read a VIN. I want to tell you what happened next, because it was not what I expected.

The response genuinely caught me off guard. My inbox filled up, and here is the thing, plenty of you were not writing about selling anything. You typed in an old VIN purely to see if your car had ever sold online before. Not to sell it. Not to check a market. Just to find out if Sam remembered it.

I had not thought much about that as a use case when we built this. But it makes complete sense. If you have owned a car for years, there is a real chance it passed through someone else's hands before yours, and an auction listing from that sale might still be sitting out there. Photos. A description. Maybe the exact mileage it had back then. Sam finding that for you is its own small thrill, nothing to do with selling at all.

Of course we had a few bugs. I will not bore you with the details, but as one reader, Steve, put it, "the potential to see sale history is a really slick feature." Steve also found two of those bugs. Both were fixed the same day he reported them. That is how this works around here.

Getting feedback like the above and this is why we build tools to help the community and we have so much more to come!!

“Wow!  Just  demo'd using my Hellcat's VIN and very impressive!

Now I just bought my Hellcat so not interested in selling and it's only been in a private sale so no auction history, I will say the VIN lookup was successful, the layout is clear and uncluttered, and the verbiage is direct, informative, and friendly.”

And the best outcome of the whole thing came from a reader named Tom, who has owned his Jaguar E-Type for 55 years. He tried its number and Sam could not make sense of it. Fair enough, cars built before 1981 never had a standard 17-digit VIN, they used chassis numbers, and Sam had never been taught to look for those. That one email sent us digging, and it turns out we already had over 11,000 of these older chassis numbers sitting in our own archive. We just were not checking them.

So here is the upgrade: if you have an old VIN that is not the usual 17 digits, and that car has sold online before, Sam could now recognize it. We do not have every VIN ever sold, no one does, but the archive grows every single day, and we're actively adding more history behind the scenes as we speak. If your car does not turn up yet, it might soon. And yes, the live auction houses are coming to this too, so a car that only ever crossed the block at somewhere like Gooding will eventually get the same treatment.

None of this happened because we planned it perfectly. It happened because you told us what you were actually doing with it. Keep doing that.

Try it yourself HERE

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