After 24 years of collecting, Beau Boeckmann has reached a point where even he can’t give every car his full attention.

“If I’m not going to really give these cars the justice they deserve, somebody else should have that chance,” Boeckmann says.

It’s a simple explanation for a decision that will see more than 120 cars from his personal collection find new homes. But there is a little more to it than that. For Boeckmann, the car customizer and television personality who helped bring American car culture to mainstream audiences through Pimp My Ride and Car Kings, collecting has always been about the stories behind the machines.

The President of California’s Galpin Motors has spent more than two decades assembling a collection that reflects the breadth of his interests and his place at the heart of America’s custom-car scene. Hot rods sit alongside American muscle cars, historic customs, coachbuilt creations, and Hollywood icons. Together, they offer a distinctly American take on car culture, shaped as much by the people who built, drove, and modified these machines as by the cars themselves.

Now, Boeckmann is ready to pass them on. The collection will be offered across two RM Sotheby’s sales: a live auction in Arizona on 28 January, followed by an online sale closing on 4 February.

The selection is unusually eclectic. Among its highlights is a 1932 Ford Highboy Roadster known as “The Edelbrock Special.” Built and raced by Bill Likes, a machine shop operator for performance equipment pioneer Vic Edelbrock Sr., the car enjoyed considerable success in RTA and SCTA competition throughout the 1950s, setting numerous land-speed records at venues including Bonneville and El Mirage.

Also offered is the Galpin Ford GTR-1, Galpin’s first coachbuilt supercar. Unveiled on the concept lawn at the 2013 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, it was conceived as an ultra-high-performance road car, combining bespoke carbon fiber bodywork with a dramatically reworked aluminum chassis and a modified, supercharged 5.4-liter V-8 producing more than 1,000 horsepower.

An Aston Martin Virage “Vacances” might appear almost restrained by comparison, but its story is anything but conventional. It began life as a standard Virage saloon before Aston Martin’s Works Service stretched it by roughly 12 inches, added two rear doors, and upgraded it to 6.3-liter specification for German collector Dr. Roland Müller. He named it “Vacances,” reflecting its use as a holiday car. The result was sufficiently striking that Prince Jefri of Brunei commissioned six further, even longer examples after seeing it at the factory. With just seven built in total, the Vacances is one of the rarest and most unusual expressions of Aston Martin’s coachbuilding tradition.

These cars have very different histories, but they share a common thread: each has a story worth telling. For Boeckmann, that has always been part of the attraction.

“Almost everything I’m selling has a unique story to it,” he explains. “During Covid, I bought a lot of cars. And I kind of realized that, boy, I’m at the point where I’m not able to really give the cars the attention that they deserve.

“I love telling stories. And with some of the cars, the stories have been told, and with others, I’m not going to get the chance to tell these stories. So somebody else should have that chance.”