There's nothing quite like reading the auction results to deflate your hopes of ever owning that collector car you've always longed for and thought that maybe, somehow, if you leveraged yourself to the brink of insolvency, you might just be able to afford someday. Take the Bentley 4½ Liter, for example. If you were watching the Gooding & Co. auction in Monterey last August, you saw a 1931 4½ Liter supercharged roadster sell for a jaw-dropping $4,510,000. Goodbye, Bentley dreams, right?

Well, yes, probably, though they're not sailing quite as far out of reach as you might think. The $4.51 million price paid was not for just any old 4½ Liter, if there is such a thing, but for one of the 50 supercharged, or "blower," Bentleys built by the factory. Moreover, it was coveted as a highly original car, with a boat-tail body by Gurney Nutting, and had been owned by the late Ann Klein, the widow of a well-known British collector, Bill Klein.

As over-the-top as the Gooding result is, its actual effect is to make the run-of-the-mill 4½ Liter — again, if there is any such thing — look nearly affordable, even if its price tag could buy you two or three nice houses. Though so few cars change hands that it's hard to generalize, 4½ Liters seem to be trading in the $400,000 to $500,000 range, with prices going up to $1 million for the most coveted examples.

The 4½ Liter — naturally, with a touring body, and finished in green — has been a collector car nearly as long as it's been in existence, and its values have been rising slowly, but inexorably, for decades. As an investment, this is old-money, blue-chip territory, with no exhilarating price spikes, and no heart-stopping plummets. "Values have steadily been going up since Bentley Drivers Club came out in 1936," said Robert McLellan, owner of the McLellan's Automotive History literature business, proprietor of the recently established vintagebentleys.org Web site, and lifelong Bentley enthusiast.

There's no question that the 4½ Liter has the right stuff to hold its place among the world's most desirable cars. An outright win in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1928, one of the marque's legendary five Le Mans wins between 1924 and 1930, is just the tip of its exhaustive racing pedigree. Visually impressive, beautifully engineered and constructed, expensive and exclusive when new, the big Bentley is a fitting representative of the best of Britain's pre-war automobiles.

The curveball for would-be Bentley owners, according to McLellan, is that so many of the 670 4½ Liters built between 1927 and 1931 have been modified from their original specification. "Over the years have been maintained in one fashion or another to keep them on the road," he said. "To pinpoint the values of the cars is kind of tough. How do you do that when the cars have been restored so many times, some of them several times?" One widespread practice has been to replace an original sedan body with the open, Le Mans-replica touring body.

Howard Krimko isn't sure how much all of that really matters. "Bentley guys don't seem to care," said Krimko, who sells new and vintage Bentleys at his Long Island dealership. Champion Motor Group. "They want to drive these cars and have fun with them." He is currently offering a 1928 4½ Liter, with tourer-style coachwork, and readily divulges that the car was originally fitted with a Gurney Nutting sedan body. Powered by an engine that was one of the spares at Le Mans, the car is priced at $500,000.

Although the relative weakness of the U.S. dollar has led to buying sprees by European collectors, Krimko does not see any speculation in the 4½ Liter market. "These cars are not traded like stocks. They're selling because they're coming out of a collection of people in their late eighties," he said. "The cars I'm seeing have been in collections for a long time." And they're likely to stay with their new owners for a long time, too.