Okay. I’m older, and so it is time to get the sports car.

In all seriousness, I have been into cars since I was young and I’ve always wanted to buy a performance automobile. But I am also cheap, and so I like to get a good deal.

A friend of mine has turned me on to a website called Bring a Trailer (BaT). Apparently it started out as a blog about cool cars for sale on eBay, and it has grown into the leading online auction site for classic and collectable cars.

Of call the cars I’ve owned, I’ve really enjoyed the convertibles. I had a yellow 1978 MGB that I put nearly 60,000 miles on in three years (driving it cross country twice) and I still think yellow is the best color for a sports car, as well as a black 1986 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce. I’ve also owned a number of Mercedes sedans (mainly W108s), with the most modern car being a 2004 C230 Sport.

My wife doesn’t like convertibles, which puts me in a quandary, as unless it is raining or snowing the top is always down on my cars. I don’t really like the look of convertibles with the top up, so I wanted a car with a retractable hard top. Thus when the top is up it will look like it isn’t a convertible, but when I’m in it the top can be quickly lowered.

The earliest hard top convertible I know about is the Ford Fairlane Skyliner, but there have been others since. The one I always desired was the Mercedes SL, an S-Class high performance roadster. The models that have depreciated the most are the fourth generation SL, those from 2002-2008, known as the R230.

I ended up buying a 2003 Mercedes SL55 AMG, in silver over charcoal with just over 18,000 miles, that I won on a BaT auction.

I love the look of Mercedes racing silver, and I ended up calling this car The Shark. It was a solid buy, with basically one owner, low miles and all available options.

There is a great book on the R230 available digitally on Amazon for $10 that I can highly recommend. I learned from that book that the 2003 model year was the highest production year for the car (it was introduced in 2002 in Europe but 2003 in the US) and that silver and black are the most common colors. For the 2003 models there were 14 different color options and three of them were various shades of black and four of them were shades of silver.

Now silver over red is the classic 300SL color and I would probably have been satisfied if that was the color for The Shark, so I’ve been curious to see what other color options might show up for sale.

As I was to find out, there was one in particular I wanted.