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It’s been a while since I’ve written much about Hemmings, and there’s a fairly simple reason for that. There just hasn’t been that much to write about.

I still keep an eye on their auctions, but I haven’t seen the online auction side progressing in any particularly meaningful way. They obviously still sell cars and occasionally get something very good, but given the Hemmings name, its history and the size of its audience, I’ve been waiting to see where they actually want to take all of this.

This week we got something that initially looked like another feature being added to the marketplace, but the more I looked at it, the more I wondered whether there might be a much bigger play here.

Hemmings has launched Hemmings Financing.

You can already see it appearing directly inside its auction listings. Take the rather lovely 1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GTS currently being auctioned. When I looked, bidding was at $325,000 and underneath it Hemmings was showing an estimated payment of $5,484 a month, together with the ability to get pre-approved.

Financing collector cars is obviously nothing new, and Hemmings certainly isn’t the first auction platform to put financing in front of buyers.

BaT offers access to financing through its Verified Checkout partnership with Caramel, which can connect buyers with third-party lenders, including specialists in classic and luxury cars. Cars & Bids works with LightStream, while Woodside Credit has been financing collector and exotic cars for years and has had a long relationship with Barrett-Jackson. Then there’s duPont REGISTRY, which earlier this year went considerably further and actually bought specialist luxury and exotic finance company LLP Exotic Auto Finance.

So Hemmings is certainly not walking into an empty room.

But there was something in their announcement that made me curious. Hemmings said its new financing business wouldn’t just finance cars bought on Hemmings. Find an eligible collector car on another marketplace or even buy one privately and you can still potentially finance it through Hemmings.

I had a few questions about exactly how all of this was going to work, and fair play to Hemmings, I sent them over and they came straight back with answers.

Hemmings Financing is powered by TFS, and when someone applies, multiple lenders can be considered to find offers that fit that particular customer. Hemmings wouldn’t tell me exactly how many lenders are involved for proprietary reasons, which is fair enough.

The answer I was really interested in, though, was whether offering financing on cars bought elsewhere meant the ambition was bigger than simply helping sell more cars on Hemmings.

Apparently it is. “The ambition is bigger than simply using financing to sell more cars on Hemmings; it’s about giving more people the tools and access to participate in the hobby,” they told me.

They also said that offering financing beyond the Hemmings Marketplace allows them to serve enthusiasts wherever they find the right car, while introducing more people to the broader Hemmings ecosystem.

And that’s where I started thinking about this a little differently.

On a micro level, putting financing underneath a Hemmings auction makes complete sense. You’ve already got someone looking at the car and thinking about buying it, so why wouldn’t you make it as easy as possible for them to work out how to pay for it?

The macro opportunity is potentially much more interesting, but also considerably harder.

If I win a $200,000 Porsche on BaT, BaT is already putting Caramel and its lending partners in front of me as part of its own process. If I’m buying somewhere else, there are already established specialist lenders that know these cars and have been doing this for years.

So what makes me leave wherever I’m already buying the car and go to Hemmings to finance it?

I don’t think that’s really a financing question. It’s a marketing and execution question.

Maybe Hemmings can get me a better rate. Maybe they can offer longer terms, find a lender willing to finance a car somebody else won’t, or simply make the whole process easier. Perhaps the bigger opportunity is getting to me before I buy the car at all. If I’m already pre-approved through Hemmings for $200,000 before I start shopping, suddenly it doesn’t matter very much to Hemmings whether I eventually find the car on their marketplace, BaT, at a dealer or from somebody privately.

That starts to look like a much bigger business than simply adding financing to Hemmings Auctions.

And we’re seeing other companies in this space thinking along similar lines. duPont buying LLP is probably the clearest example. Rather than simply referring customers to a finance company, they bought one. Woodside has spent years building a business specifically around financing collector and exotic cars. There is clearly money to be made around the transaction that has nothing to do with collecting the auction fee itself.

Perhaps that’s part of what Hemmings is seeing too. They already have the one thing that would be incredibly expensive for a new finance business to build from scratch: a 70-plus-year-old brand and a very large audience of people who like old and interesting cars. If Hemmings can convince even a small percentage of those people to think of them when they need to finance a collector car, regardless of where they buy it, then this becomes considerably more interesting.

Of course, having the audience and getting them to actually use the product are two completely different things.

That’s the part I’ll be watching because I’m not yet sure why somebody buying on another platform would automatically think of Hemmings for financing. Hemmings will have to give them a reason, and then market that reason very well.

But maybe I’ve also been looking at Hemmings the wrong way. I’ve spent the last couple of years waiting for them to do something that really moves Hemmings Auctions forward. Perhaps the bigger opportunity isn’t trying to beat BaT at auctions at all.

If Hemmings can finance the car, insure it, value it (which is a topic for another day) and provide other services around ownership, perhaps they don’t necessarily have to be the company that sold it.

And that might ultimately be a much larger play.

I know what some of you are thinking. Surely we have enough online auction platforms by now? Apparently not :)

There's another one launching soon called FinalLap, and as I've said before, if you're going to enter this market today I think you need to bring something genuinely different with you. There's very little point launching another site where a car sits online for seven days and then everyone turns up for the last few minutes. BaT has that business pretty well covered, along with quite a few others trying to do much the same thing.

It's one of the reasons Dutch Auctions caught my attention recently. Whether its idea ultimately works or not, at least there's a reason for it to exist, and FinalLap is coming at the same problem with a completely different twist.

The easiest way I can describe it is to think about a lane at Manheim, only online. The cars will be available to browse throughout the week, with the photos, videos, history, documents and seller Q&A you'd expect, so you'll still have plenty of time to do your due diligence, ask questions and decide whether you actually want the car. The big difference is that you can't bid on any of them yet.

Every Friday at 1PM ET, FinalLap's auction starts and the cars begin going through one by one. Each gets a few minutes, late bids extend the clock, and when one finishes the next comes straight in behind it. Instead of hundreds of auctions ending at different times throughout the week, everyone on FinalLap is watching and bidding on the same car at the same time. They call it "The Weekly Internet Car Auction Event," which sounds a little grand before they've actually held one, but I can see what they're trying to do.

Anyone who has been to a physical auction knows you end up watching cars you had absolutely no intention of buying. You might be waiting for lot 36, but you're still standing there when lot 29 rolls through and suddenly you're interested. That's something I don't think online auctions have ever really replicated. I might go onto BaT because I'm following a particular car, but I'm not normally going to sit there and watch the next eight auctions end just because they're next.

FinalLap is essentially betting that it can bring some of that behavior back to the internet, and I think that's where this either gets interesting or falls apart. If I'm only interested in lot nine, am I really going to sit around watching the first eight cars?

Perhaps, if the whole thing moves quickly and the cars are good enough. If every Friday becomes something car people genuinely want to watch, whether they're buying or not, then they may have created something. If I'm sitting around for 45 minutes waiting for the one Porsche I came to bid on, perhaps not.

The other thing I like here is who's behind it. Marshall Haas (who i don’t know) is one of the founders and previously founded Somewhere.com, grew it to more than 150 employees and sold it at a reported $52 million valuation in 2024. I always think having already been through the startup journey helps because building something from scratch is very different from having a clever idea for something, and he's already experienced all the not particularly glamorous stuff that happens between the two.

He's also a proper car guy, collecting Porsche, Ferrari and McLaren, which is actually how he met co-founder Hazem Giballi after buying a rare PTS GT3 from him. Hazem founded Trofeo Collection, the boutique supercar dealership, after spending close to a decade as an NBA agent and business manager, while the third founder, Courtney Guertin, co-founded Ease and built it as CTO before it became part of Employee Navigator. So between them there's somebody who has built and sold a company, somebody who actually sells high-end cars and somebody who has built technology businesses. It guarantees absolutely nothing, but it's not a bad combination to start with.

There's also a funny little story behind the name because it wasn't supposed to be FinalLap at all. The original name was QuickShift, until a finance company apparently came down pretty heavily on them over it. Rather than spend their time and money fighting over a name, they changed it, and I actually think they ended up with a better one.

FinalLap makes sense for what they're trying to build. You spend the week looking at the cars, doing the homework and deciding what you want, then Friday comes around and everyone turns up for the final bit together.

Of course, none of this solves the biggest problem facing every new auction platform, which is getting the cars in the first place. You need good cars to attract bidders, but sellers generally want to see bidders before they'll give you their good cars. It's the horrible chicken-and-egg problem every new marketplace has, and FinalLap seems to be trying something interesting there too.

They're recruiting a small group of "founding partner" dealers who will apparently receive a share of what FinalLap makes on every car they bring, along with preferred positioning in the weekly running order. I think that's quite clever. Rather than relying entirely on persuading individual owners to take a chance on a platform with no auction history, give dealers who already have interesting inventory a financial reason to help build the supply.

I did try clicking both "Talk to us about selling" and "Become a founding partner" to find out a little more, but neither button was working when I tried them, so perhaps FinalLap isn't quite ready for all of us poking around yet :) Then again, Haas has built a startup before, so he'll know as well as anyone that sometimes it's better to put something out into the world, see what happens and fix a few buttons along the way rather than spend another six months waiting for everything to be perfect.

What matters much more is whether they can get those first few Friday lineups right. There's a line on the seller page that probably sums up the whole bet better than I can: "Five focused minutes beats seven quiet days in a sea of other auctions."

Maybe, but those seven days aren't necessarily very quiet when your car is sitting in front of an enormous established audience. Five minutes with everyone's attention sounds great, but first you have to get everyone into the room, and that's ultimately what FinalLap has to prove.

If they can build a habit where car people tune in every Friday at 1PM even when they're not actively looking to buy something, I think the concept gets really interesting. A seller isn't just getting another listing sitting among hundreds of others. For those few minutes, their car genuinely does have the whole room, and perhaps somebody who turned up for the Porsche suddenly starts bidding on the Ferrari that came through two lots earlier.

That's why this one caught my attention. FinalLap isn't simply turning up with another BaT clone and a different logo. They're making a fairly specific bet that you can keep everything we like about having a week to inspect an online auction while bringing back some of the theater and concentrated attention of a live one.

Whether people will organize part of their Friday around it, whether somebody waiting for lot ten will happily watch the first nine, and most importantly whether FinalLap can consistently find enough interesting cars to make people tune in even when they have absolutely no intention of buying anything, we'll find out.

But I'll certainly tune into the first one, and considering how many new auction platforms I get told about, that's probably not a bad start.

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