Bernie Ecclestone – the man who controlled the commercial rights to F1 for 30 years before its sale to Liberty Media in 2017 – is a complicated man, to say the least. What isn’t complicated, though, is his simply vast collection of Formula 1 and Grand Prix racing cars, which is going up for sale.
Ecclestone, now 94, built up his 69-strong collection over a period of 50 years, and it includes cars of massive historical significance. Among it are many Ferraris, including the 375 with which Alberto Ascari won the 1951 Italian Grand Prix; the very first example of the 312, apparently thought by the company to be the most original F1 car surviving from the mid 1960s, and a 246 driven by Mike Hawthorn – the last ever front-engined F1 car to finish in a podium position.
The Brabham team also crops up multiple times, unsurprisingly considering Ecclestone owned it for many years. The cars that took Nelson Piquet to two of his three world championships are featured, as is the legendary Gordon Murray-designed BT46B ‘fan car’. Featuring a giant fan that sucked the car to the ground, it raced exactly once, at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, with Niki Lauda dominating the race and winning by over 30 seconds. The car was swiftly banned, and Ecclestone has owned this example ever since.
While there’s no full rundown of the collection, the images show that it spans many decades, from Auto Unions from the 1930s – before F1 had even been established as a world championship – to the screaming Ferrari F2002, with which Michael Schumacher left the rest of the field in his dust in 2002.
Bernie Ecclestone’s F1 car collection
Ecclestone said of the sale: “Having collected what are the best and most original Formula 1 cars dating back to the start of the sport, I have now decided to move them on to new homes that will treat them as I have and look after them as precious works of art.”
The whole lot’s going up for sale with high-end UK car dealer Tom Hartley Jnr. How much could they all fetch? Not a clue, but it’s probably in the area of ‘wow, can numbers even go that high?’
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