Wow. No, make that whoa. Why? More rumor and myth than car, this here is an honest to goodness Vector M12. And its yours for the taking. Unsure as to what you're about to bid on? Here's the explanation. To those of us that grew on on A-Team and Knight Rider, the Lamborghini Countach was the most positively exotic automobile ever. Forget about reality (and reliability, livability, etc.), our biggest hopes and dreams involved us in a black Countach with Paulina Porizkova and or Kathy Ireland riding shotgun. Not that we would have known what to do with either the car or the girl, but hey – we were twelve. But there was a dark side.
Vectors. They were like evil spirits. Something cooked up by the government in Area 51 using alien technology. And not just that regular old alien tech – we're talking the crazy stuff. You simply cannot imagine how impossibility AWESOME the Vector W2 was to a twelve-year-old mind. And you should have seen the jet fighter interior. It was like the space shuttle – the evil space shuttle. Then the W8 came out and it was still basically as nasty and mind bending. Then in the mid-Nineties, the M12 showed up, and well, the a little of the luster was lost.
We've heard some abso-fab stories – guns, cocaine, barricading one's self inside a building for 30 days – about what was going on at Vector in 1995. Suffice to say there was a very ugly battle between founder Jerry Wiegert and an Indonesian company called Megatech that hostilely took Vector over and canned Wiegert. As a result, the M12 never got the 1,200 hp twin-turbo 7.0-liter V8 (or the Wiegertian top speed of 250 mph) that was planned for the never released WX-3. The M12 did however get the WX-3's aesthetics, although in reality it was nothing more than a Lamborghini Diablo with a goofy looking fiberglass body, terrible three-spoke wheels, the lowest rent interior possibly imaginable – and it weighed 3,600 pounds.
more ...
Although muscle cars are usually in the spotlight at Barrett-Jackson, there were quite a few interesting supercars that caught our attention as well. First up was a Saleen S7 Twin-Turbo done up in stunning Beryllium custom paint. This particular car served as a press vehicle for Saleen and was featured in the movie Redline (who cares?), and Iron Man (cool!). Did we mention it also has the one-and-only 1,000-horsepower upgrade done by the factory. The winning bidder took the car home for $412,000. For a little more than half that much, another bidder took home one of the ultimate supercars of the last decade, a 1993 Jaguar XJ220. Other examples sold in the past few years have gone for a mere fraction of the original list price, and we think this car was well sold at the coincidental price of $220,000, perhaps due to its DOT/EPA certification. For those looking for a supercar on a budget, there was a 1996 Vector M12, one of only 14 built with just 6,388 miles, that sold for a mere $94,600. Other exotics that crossed the block included a Hennessey Venom 700R that sold for $115,500 and an Ultima Can-Am purchased for $51,700.
