Bill Watts with Dale Earnhardt.
Welcome to The Bill Watts Collection at GoMotorBids.com. Mr. Watts is a collector and collectibles distributor from Kannapolis, NC, who began business in 1985 with baseball cards. As the popularity of NASCAR grew in the late 80’s, Watts began carrying the MAXX race cards. He recognized shortly thereafter that diecast would be the next big thing, and he became an early distributor for Racing Champions.
He attended the New York Toy Fair from 1991 – 2007, and was very close to Racing Champions founders Boyd Meyer and Fred Wagenhals. In fact, many of the licensing samples and prototypes that are in this collection were gifts from Meyer, and were initially used for taking orders at the Toy Fair. When Wagenhals split from Racing Champions and formed Action Performance Companies, Watts again expanded his product line with the Action brand. Over the years Bill Watts Collectibles carried virtually every brand of racing collectibles at one point or another, which gave Watts the ability to amass an extremely impressive personal cache of rare and unique pieces.
The early prototypes in The Bill Watts Collections are a testament to the humble beginnings of die-cast collectibles, before the days where authenticity holograms were considered... so crudely packaged and thrown together that it begs the question, how could it be a production sample? Some of the cars & trucks have a different chassis than the actual production samples, or do not have any trademarks stamped into the undercarriage- again, put together on the fly for the purpose of order taking. We know that some of our customers will find the roots of die-cast history appealing, while others may gravitate to a comforting label that confirms a product's value in words - not in it's unpolished details. At minimum we know that every collector will at least appreciate the back story.
Be sure to check this section often, as a new round of auction from The Bill Watts Collection will be posted weekly.
Bill Watts (right) with John Force (left) and Action Performance CEO Fred Wagenhals (center).
