Dennis Collins, car restorer extraordinaire, is known for his frequent appearances on the Gas Monkey Garage’s show on Discovery, Fast N Loud with his friend and co-collaborator, Richard Rawlings. But Collins is more than just a car show guest. He is one man who has restored countless cars, and many rare editions have also passed through his tinkering, restoring hands.
But which of the classic cars that he has healed, so to speak, is the rarest of them all?
We dug deep for this information because Dennis Collins began his career in automobile restoring right after college, beginning with his Jeep outfitting operation called Collins Bros Jeep in 1984. His car-healing career will span 40 years in 2024 so there have been countless cars that have come and gone in his lifetime.
That said; this is the rarest car Dennis Collins has ever found, restored, and sold, the last of which has been to his everlasting regret…
It’s A Nash-Healey
Before you get too excited about this bit of information thinking we gave the game away, apparently, more than 200 Nash-Healeys have been worked on by the man himself. And this was a car that lasted all that long on the market and neither are there too many examples of it around.
For those who aren’t even sure what a Nash-Healey is, let’s begin at the beginning. The 1953 Corvette, for all its value and worth today, is wrongly known as America’s first sports car. While it has been the longest-surviving American sports car to date, another company envisaged, built, and sold America’s first sports car, and the car was the Nash-Healey.
The men behind the car were Donald Healey and Nash-Kelvinator CEO George W. Mason, whose chance meeting on an ocean liner, Queen Elizabeth, sparked off an idea. Healey was disappointed because his attempt at sourcing engines for the Healey Silverstone, from Cadillac, had failed. Mason offered Healey the Ambassador's engine, a 3.85-liter inline-six along with other powertrain components.
From serendipity, came the Nash-Healey, America’s first post-war production sportscar that preceded the Corvette and thumbed its nose against GM, who had not provided Healey with the Cadillac engines he had desired.
The body of the Nash-Healey came from Italian designer Pinin Farina (and yes, the current coach-building company Pininfarina is his legacy), and the cost rose to nearly $6,000. In the same year, GM's Chevrolet introduced the Corvette at a much lower price of $3,513. Needless to say, the end of the Nash-Healey was nigh, with a total of 506 cars ever made.
The Rarest Is The Very First Nash-Healey Ever
With a little more than 500 cars made in the ‘50s, every Nash-Healey is a rare car and each is worth a decent sum of money. But the rarest of them all can be a title rightly worn by the very first Nash-Healey that rolled off the assembly line back then, bearing chassis no. N2001, and wearing a Panelcraft alloy body.
This car is even rarer because of being the personal ride of the carmaker, Donald Healey himself, although it exchanged many owners later. After Donald Healey, this particular car came to be owned by Howard Baski, Donald J. Moore, Allan Casavant, and Jerry Bensinger. Finally, it came to Dennis Collins for a mere sum of $8,000.
There have been questions raised over its cost. How did such a rare car get so lost in time, that it was sold for peanuts? We do not know and in the automobile world, some questions perhaps do not have answers. Important pieces of automobile history have been rediscovered as barn finds many a time. Memories fade with time as do cars.
But Dennis Collins did get this car, and he did restore it to its former glory. So much so that it later sold for $500,000.
This is one car Dennis Collins regrets selling, considering its rarity and value to the American automobile industry and also because, in 2015, the car sold again, this time for $1 million. Meaning within two years, the value doubled. Or rather, the value we not up exponentially, from the $8,000 Collins purchased it for, to the whopping $1 million it sold for later. It's 2020 now, and who knows how much it would sell again for the next time?
Remember the Nash-Healey comes with impeccable lineage and was the 1952 LeMans winner in third place. While this car may have died in 1954, its legacy lived on in the Austin-Healey for time to come, with Donald Healey managing to put another feather in his cap.
Another Rare Healey Is Still With Collins
Dennis Collins is a true fan of the Healey, so much so there’s another million-dollar car in his possession, this being a 1958 Austin-Healey 100-Six. This was the promotional Austin-Healey car at the 1950 London Motors Show at Earls Court and later went on to become the contest car and offered as a prize by The Daily Express.
Known as “Goldie”, this Austin-Healey was a single-made non-production car that came with the most sumptuous luxury the time could offer back then, and later painstakingly restored to its former glory by Dennis Collins himself with plenty of gold plating to please even the pickiest of car buyers from the Middle East.
The car is listed on Collins’ website for $1 million. Any takers?
Sources: Hemmings, Hooniverse, CollinsBrosJeep