“We don’t leave the doors open very often,” says Marc Corea, owner of MotorCarTrader.com. “We like our inventory to be private.”
But leaving the doors open to his sports car showroom last April turned out to be a brilliant move. “This guy sees the Jags in the showroom and stops in,” he says. “I have a 1962 Jaguar convertible at my house,” said the wanderer, Erik Ferguson. “Are you interested in looking at it?”
It took Corea all of three seconds to say yes.
Ferguson’s mom bought the Jaguar for $1,000 in 1975 after her family sedan was T-boned at an intersection. They took the insurance settlement and then discovered the Jag for sale at a body shop in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A gentleman walked into Marc Corea’s sports car shop and asked if he might be interested in buying his 1962 E-Type. It had been residing in a barn for nearly 40 years. MARC COREA
Ferguson and his mom drove the car sparingly for a couple of years then parked it in their barn in 1977. Ferguson had always thought about restoring the car but never got around to it.
“I drove up to the barn, and the Jag was trapped inside,” Corea says. “He (Ferguson) had to move an old CJ Jeep and pull the Jag out with a tractor. But once it was outside, I realized this was pretty special.”
The 3.8-liter, non-flat-floor E-Type had only 49,830 miles on the odometer. “We agreed on a price, and I had the car flat-bedded back to my shop,” he says. “There was so much dirt flying off it, I wouldn’t have wanted to be riding behind it.”
“You can find undesirable cars all day long, but this car is special, like the Holy Grail.”
Thankfully he didn’t have to fight a war for it. Crusading through friendly barns is fine with Corea.