One of the most significant sales from this past weekend – from a hot rodder’s perspective – was that of Tweedy Pie at RM‘s event. Tweedy Pie, as many of us know, was a T-bucket originally owned and built by Bob Johnston in Anaheim, California, in the mid-1950s, but made recognizable to the wider collector-car community when Ed “Big Daddy” Roth bought it off of Johnston and made it his own in the early 1960s. Ed was the one who not only gave it the quad headlamps and baby moons on chrome reverse steelies, but also was responsible for it becoming a Revell model kit.
We wrote briefly about Tweedy Pie last year prior to its turn across the block at Mecum’s Monterey auction, where it bid up to $200,000 without hitting the seller’s reserve. With no reserve on Tweedy Pie at RM’s Arizona auction this past weekend (and a $200,000 to $250,000 pre-auction estimate), bidding went nearly as high, but topped out at $176,000. That just about falls in line with the prices paid for a couple of other Roth-related cars that sold at RM’s Icons of Speed and Style auction back in 2009: the $187,000 paid for the Road Agent, and the $203,500 paid for the Druid Princess.