Bread & Circuses; AT ARIZONA AUCTIONS, RATIONAL REALISM REPLACES IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE.(NEWS)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

THE COLLECTOR-CAR MARKET HAS not crashed and burned, but it has hit a heck of a speed bump. Sales at four of the five Phoenix auctions last month were down, with the companies offering various interpretations of how those down numbers were actually up and how they were really happy with them.

"The car-collector community enjoyed another stellar Scottsdale event at Barrett-Jackson, said Craig Jackson, CEO of Barrett-Jackson, the granddaddy of all Arizona auctions.

Despite a disastrous economic climate, Barrett-Jackson managed to sell nearly $61 million worth of cars and at least one airplane, twice as much as the next-closest Arizona auction performance. But last year, that figure was $84 million, and the year before that, it was $108 million.

Still, walking around the circus tent that is Barrett-Jackson, you'd never have known that anything was wrong. The place was packed with more than 200,000 people. In all, Barrett-Jackson rolled 1,082 cars over the block in six days.

As it has done for five years now, Barrett-Jackson offered all of its cars at no reserveno matter what the bids were, the cars were going to new owners.

The Barrett-Jackson schedule had room for 252 cars from General Motors' Heritage Fleet, a tidal basin of semihistorical cars that the General keeps in warehouses around Detroit. What showed up in Scottsdale were mostly high-quality Chevrolet Corvettes and show cars, led by the 1996 Buick Blackhawk custom, which went for $522,500.