(MONEY Magazine) – It looked like a flashback to the '50s as the pack of 24 classic beauties shot down the straightaway for the first of 10 noisy laps. At the wheel of his restored '57 Porsche, Don Sandy began dueling it out with the Alfas and Triumphs crowding the pavement, pushing to catch No. 626, a slick silver Porsche Carrera that was already threatening to live up to its nickname: the Silver Bullet. Sandy tried to go for an opening. Whoa! A '59 Porsche cut in front of him. No problem; he could handle going sideways. Nobody would run him off the track. These drivers were his comrades; their rule was ''race carefully.'' Besides, their cars were too pretty to crash. To the 30,000 spectators at the Laguna Seca Raceway, it looked and sounded like real racing. To a gung-ho competitor like Don Sandy, it even felt like real racing. But he and his fellow road jockeys were all amateur competitors -- doctors and lawyers and company payrollmeisters, refugees from the workaday Rolodex world -- chasing each other around the 2.2-mile track for fun and no profit. There are no trophies or cash prizes for crossing the finish line first in this contest. At California's Monterey Historic Automobile Races, driving to win is considered bad form, even dangerous. It's the cars, not the drivers, that are the stars of this auto nostalgiafest, and most of them are too valuable and their owners too sensible to consider mere victory worth a $50,000 repair bill, let alone a hospital visit. ''I'm not here to win,'' declares Sandy, a 57-year-old award-winning architect. ''I'm here to relax.'' The relaxation costs him money, of course: $6,000 a year to race the Porsche seven times a season. But the expenses are minor compared with the gain from his investment. Sandy's 13 vintage sports cars, which took him 30 years and $206,000 to accumulate and restore, are now worth $700,000 -- an increase of 240%. He has the best of both worlds: a dream hobby that's fun and creates profits too -- on paper, anyhow. Even with the vintage market softening dramatically -- as it did in 1990, when it fell as much as 50% -- collector cars have appreciated more than 350% from 1981 to today with some, like a 1957 Aston Martin DB5 roadster, rising as / much as 1,400%. And the interest in racing these drivable savings accounts has mushroomed right along with the prices. Twenty years ago, U.S. vintage racing comprised a smattering of car buffs who drove their old sports cars to the track, unbolted the mufflers, wheeled around for a few laps, then retired to the pits, drank beer and swapped lies for an evening. Today the sport encompasses 44 clubs and organizations and some 79 racing events a year staged across the country from Pocono, Pa. to Palm Springs, Calif. ''This is a sport where the average Joe can go wheel to wheel with the rich guys and then go into the pits and change the spark plugs with them,'' says Rick Cole, vintage sports car auctioneer, collector, driver and partner in the Los Angeles-based Cole-Yacoobian Racing Team. While it doesn't hurt to be a millionaire, all it takes is a little driving skill and a $10,000 refurbished Austin Healey Sprite to earn your place in this kinetic museum. And if you don't want to race but simply want to have fun tooling around in an old sports car, you can get into the game for a lot less, as the table on page 146 shows. The place it's tough to measure up to the competition is at the very top level of the sport -- events like the Monterey Historics. The barrier to joining the big boys -- the people who race real collector cars -- is the price of their toys. Thanks to inflation, investment fashion and the auctioneers' hype, collector sports and race cars can now be pricier than beach lots in Malibu, and the scene inside the paddock at Laguna Seca reveals the high stakes. Eighteen-wheeler transports disgorge crews sporting monogrammed polo shirts, and $8 million prewar Bugattis wheel into the pits with immaculate ''ground up'' restorations. Meanwhile, on the track, three presumably sane owner-aficionados tear around the course, racing a trio of 1962 Ferrari GTOs worth a combined $30 million. As a consequence, there is tension in vintage racing circles between the enthusiasts and the speculators; between those who prefer their fun cheap and simple and those who want to spend big money to compete. Don Sandy is a man in the middle of this hobbyists' tempest. As a collector he's made a killing. As a racer he's exercised fiscal self-restraint. Now the questions are: If competing requires spending, how much is too much? And if winning is irrelevant, how deep into his pockets should he dig? Don Sandy has always loved cars, European sports cars especially. From the time he was an architectural student at the University of Illinois, his designer's eye and natural exuberance dictated a racy choice of wheels. He figured, if you're going to spend the rest of your life driving, why not do it in style? His first sports car was a white, wind-in-the-face, 1955 $1,300 Triumph TR2 -- British-made: noisy, leaky and a kick to drive. It was his most prized possession. Pointing the convertible west to seek his fortune in 1958, Sandy arrived at the Golden Gate with an empty gas tank, $13 in his pocket and an overdue car payment. Today, as the founding partner of Sandy & Babcock, a respected $11-million- a-year San Francisco-based architectural firm, as a family man with an attractive and intelligent wife, three homes and two beautiful daughters, what he regrets most in life is . . . selling that Triumph! The shift in loyalties occurred in 1959 when he swapped his cherished but topless TR2 for a two-year-old 1957 Porsche 356A Super coupe. It was a case of cheerio Coventry, hello Zuffenhausen. The Porsche was easy to like. Conceived before World War II and first produced in 1948, the 356 model was essentially a highly evolved Volkswagen Beetle -- with streamlining. It was robust, sturdy in the corners and built to endure. The Germans built more than 79,000 of them from 1948 to 1965, and even though it was shaped like a Camay soap bar, Sandy thought, ''In its own way it's beautiful.'' The romance has endured for 456,000 miles, eight clutches and seven paint jobs. Sandy took the car on his honeymoon with his wife Carol, then used it to commute to the office for the next 10 years. Eventually, as his family grew, the honeymoon car begat a collection of five more secondhand 356s: four coupes (including one for a bargain $3,500) and a $15,000 Cabriolet. Before long, the Sandys were an all-vintage family. Carol drove one of the restored 356s. So did each of the daughters and occasionally his friends. Giving in to the auto-collecting ''disease,'' as he calls it, Sandy tracked down two more European classics: a $3,500 1956 Austin Healey LM and a 1972 Ferrari Dino Spyder he picked up for $15,800. He had cars stored everywhere, including a carpeted garage next to his house. Jokes Carol: ''I didn't care what kind of car he brought home as long as it was red.'' Her husband's hobby seemed at first like an indulgence. But once his junk turned into jewels, she became a believer. Carol's only concern these days is that he stay healthy when driving in races, a pastime he was spurred into, ironically enough, by her. As long as Sandy was building his business and raising a family, racing his collection didn't seem prudent or even feasible. Occasionally he'd take the Ferrari out on I-5 at dawn and unleash it for a little 160-mph exercise, but that was about it -- until his 47th birthday. That's when Carol gave him a gift certificate to the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving (then in Sonoma, Calif.) so he could learn the true art of going fast. She gave him the $250 one-day course, but he liked it so much he ponied up another $1,145 and stayed for four. ''Six weeks later,'' he says, ''I took my 356 to the track.'' The first thing he had to do before competing at Sears Point, the local course, was invest $2,000 to make the car safe for racing. That bought him a new set of brake linings, a roll bar, a harness-type seat belt, and a set of Dunlop racing tires, all of which would cost $4,000 today. For crash protection, he bought an $80 Bell helmet (currently $200), a $110 Nomex racing suit (now $300) and $35 fireproof Simpson racing gloves ($70 these days). After that, all he had to do was pay the $100 track entrance fee, fill his tank with 112 octane, $1.50-a-gallon racing fuel (now $2.50), and step on the gas. Because it was vintage racing, there were some constraints on how a competitor could spend money, since the whole idea was to preserve the historical integrity of the cars. ''We stress authenticity,'' says Steve Earle, the founder of the Santa Barbara-based Historic Motor Sports Association. ''You're not allowed to rig a 1946 Allard to run like a 1966 Lotus.'' Preserving the original factory appearance was important too. There were no body alterations permitted -- no flared fenders, spoilers or customized fins. But that didn't mean there weren't some discretionary items in Sandy's budget. For $3,500, he rebuilt the motor to the original specs using higher-grade components: rods with hardened steel and tougher-grade pistons. But the car's engine displacement still had to be what it was at the time of manufacture: 1,600cc. Then there were cosmetic and convenience expenditures: a $3,192 interior restoration, a $2,000 paint job, a $1,000 trailer to transport the Porsche to the track and a $9,000 short-bed pickup to tow it. The biggest potential racing-related headache was the matter of insurance, < since the rates for protecting collector cars vary according to how and where they're used. Premiums for simply storing a classic -- covering it with a tarp and parking it in the barn -- run about one-half of 1% of the car's appraised value per year. So-called storage, transit and paddock coverage runs about twice that. Putting a 30-year-old car into a four-wheel drift on a crowded racecourse, however, was something else again. Even though vintage racing is basically 70% competition and 30% show, it's still potentially dangerous; there has been one death in the U.S. in 400 races over the past five years. The standard on-track policy that is issued through Lloyd's of London costs a hefty 10% of the value of the car per event. For a $500,000 Ford-powered 1963 C Cobra, that's $50,000 for a single race. Sandy's Porsche was worth only $25,000, but that still meant he'd be paying about $2,500 in insurance for each race. The solution for him was to ''go bare'' on the track -- race without insurance -- and get whatever coverage he could for other times. Fortunately he managed to find an overall policy from J.C. Taylor Insurance that, at an annual cost of $1,100, covered all his cars during storage and up to 2,000 miles per car per year on the road. All his cars except the Ferrari, that is. Annual fire and theft coverage was all he was willing to buy for that voluptuous beast -- and that alone cost $1,400. For races, he would personally have to pay for damages to his car and for his medical expenses, but his entrance fee covered him for liability on a policy issued to the track. During his quest for the perfect 356 Porsche and in his preparation for racing, Sandy tried to keep from going overboard. The son of two Scottish immigrants who knew the meaning of thrift, he says, ''I'm a Midwesterner. I don't like to throw money away.'' What he did like was bargain hunting. Yet the more his architecture business thrived during the '80s, the more he was tempted to get into ''serious'' vintage competition -- that is, running in yesterday's open-wheeled race cars: Scarabs and Lolas and other nonproduction machines. The problem? They cost too much. Twenty years ago a slightly used Ferrari GTO could be purchased on the open market for $10,000. Sure, it was gorgeous, but the conventional wisdom at that time was, ''It's just a race car'' -- noisy, temperamental and hard to fix. Now the same Ferrari is the automotive equivalent of a portrait by van Gogh. $ In 1989 a similar GTO was sold to an anonymous Japanese buyer for $13.7 million. For collectors like Sandy, the spectacular run-up was a two-edged sword. On the one hand it turned his cherished wheels into a valuable ''portfolio.'' On the other hand, it soon became obvious that the speculators were crowding out the ''car nuts'' and the connoisseurs. Complains Sandy: ''You had guys buying $3 million cars who didn't know where to put the oil in.'' Even the cognoscenti who could afford these limited-edition screamers would often ''sell'' them to their bankers, pocket the cash and then lease them back to drive. They could even risk racing the cars because an accident wouldn't jeopardize their value. Explains Bill Parish, an insurance broker in Nashville who specializes in vintage racing coverage: ''Most of the cars with any significant race history have all been crashed at one time or another.'' Assuming the serial number can be salvaged, says Parish, ''there isn't a vintage car competing anywhere that can't be totally rebuilt for less than $300,000.'' Thus the high rollers could afford to put their Ferraris on the track. Even without insurance, they knew the worst that could happen to one of their $10 million jewels was they'd have to pay 3% of the appraised value to restore it. Sandy didn't want to play that game. He wanted more fun for less money. So in 1986, instead of buying a ridiculously expensive Grand Prix Formula I racer, he settled on a more benign, ridiculously cheap Lotus 18 Formula Junior, which at $5,000 seemed like a steal. The only problem was that he bought the car based on a Polaroid snapshot, and when he took delivery, the body was mashed and parts of the running gear arrived in a bucket. Rebuilding it would have been impossible were it not for the existence of a certain breed of can-do mechanics willing to engage in the engineering archaeology and custom fabricating that restoring these rarities requires. The talented ones at places like Phil Reilly & Co. in Corte Madera, Calif. have plenty of work. The shop has no sign on the door and does no advertising. They do business only with people they like, and they've got a year's backlog. The wizard that Sandy found to work on his Lotus was a $50-an-hour independent named Steve Patience -- the kind of guy who, if you gave him a set of plans, could build you an automobile. It eventually took $35,000 to get the body and engine in shape, but even that wasn't enough to replace everything. On one outing at Sears Point, Sandy was going into Turn 6 doing 90 when the lock ring separated from the rear half shaft. Translation: the wheel fell off. The car rolled over. Fortunately, Sandy only dislocated his shoulder. Even though the car has been hard to keep running, Sandy is still ahead on his Lotus restoration. He's got $40,000 invested in the scaled-down racer, and he's been offered $70,000 for it. What's more, the car's value is enhanced by running in today's races, especially the Super Bowl of vintage racing, the Monterey Historics. It was the week before the Historics, and Don Sandy was not having a wonderful day. Steve Patience had called to say that when he'd opened the transmission on the Lotus, the synchromesh was in pieces and there simply wasn't enough time remaining to get it ready for the big race. Then Sandy's Porsche mechanic reported that he'd finished installing the new gas tank, but he hadn't been able to find a specialized fitting to couple it to the fuel line. No coupling, no gas. No gas, no race. Meanwhile, Sandy had arranged to sit in on a get-acquainted meeting at his San Francisco office with a group of prospective VIP design clients from Japan. He'd been working on his car the day before, and when the visitors spied the Porsche grease under the chairman's fingernails, they looked at him like they figured he was making extra money after hours working at a gas station. The architect had to show them a blowup photo of his car to make sure they understood that his hobby was car racing, not pumping gas. Somehow, by the time the three-day Monterey event rolled around, the crucial $6 coupling for the fuel tank had materialized, and he and Carol were able to tow No. 356 to the track. As usual, by the afternoon of their race, they had other things to worry about. Since Sandy had blown his No. 1 engine during his last outing, he was using his backup power plant -- the original ''honeymoon'' motor -- and it didn't seem to have the same oomph. What's more, one of the other favorites in his heat, Peter Pearce in his Silver Bullet, was running a lot faster than Sandy's 356 in practice, probably because Pearce's Porsche Carrera Speedster had a heftier motor with 140 horsepower to Sandy's 90. As if that weren't a sufficient distraction, while Don and Carol waited in the pits for his race to be called, a competitor driving a Lotus 18, similar to Sandy's other race car, had his suspension break in Turn 4 and hit the wall doing 70 mph. The driver had to be cut out of his cockpit and ferried to the hospital in an ambulance. The Sandys had no way of knowing the guy had only broken a leg. A few moments later, all this didn't seem to matter. Sandy was squealing through the turns, tearing down the straightaway at 100 mph, dicing through traffic, free of any thoughts about payrolls or Japanese clients. This was what the money and the hassles were all about: camaraderie, beautiful machinery, and 20 minutes' worth of adrenaline and sweat. Guzzling from a water jug after the race, Sandy, who placed seventh out of 24 cars, traded quips with his fellow competitors about who ate whose dust and what it felt like traveling sideways when he was supposed to go straight. Everybody acknowledged that the Silver Bullet had blown them all off the track, but so what? The ''winner'' had a $100,000 engine, and Sandy had a $25,000 car. Carol kidded him about the honeymoon motor maybe not being what it once was. ''Thanks a lot,'' joked Don. But he didn't care. There was life in his old Porsche yet.