Bernie Ecclestone puts huge F1 car collection worth ‘hundreds of millions’ up for sale

Sam Cooper
Bernie Ecclestone with his car collection

69 cars from Bernie Ecclestone's collection will go up for sale

Benire Ecclestone is to auction off his entire collection of Formula 1 cars that he acquired during his decades in the sport.

Ecclestone, now 94, served as the commercial rights holder for decades and became the true F1 supremo during that time, helping to forge the sport into what it is today, for better and for worse.

Bernie Ecclestone’s F1 car collection to go under the hammer

Ecclestone has put 69 cars up to auction through Tom Hartley Jnr Ltd and said he wants the cars to go to a good home once he is no longer alive.

“I have been collecting these cars for more than 50 years, and I have only ever bought the best of any example,” he said. “Whilst many other collectors over the years have opted for sports cars, my passion has always been for Grand Prix and Formula 1 cars.

“A Grand Prix and in particular a Formula 1 car is far more important than any road car or other form of race car, as it is the pinnacle of the sport, and all the cars I have bought over the years have fantastic race histories and are rare works of art.

“I love all of my cars but the time has come for me to start thinking about what will happen to them should I no longer be here, and that is why I have decided to sell them. After collecting and owning them for so long, I would like to know where they have gone and not leave them for my wife to deal with should I not be around.”

Of the cars up for sale, highlights include Ferraris raced in Formula 1 Grands Prix by legendary World Champions such as Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Michael Schumacher, and Brabhams raced in Formula 1 Grands Prix such as Nelson Piquet, Carlos Pace, and, again, Niki Lauda, among them the one-off Brabham-Alfa Romeo BT46B ‘fan car’, which raced only once, victoriously, to win the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp in 1978 by more than half a minute.

Ecclestone continued: “Tom [Hartley Jnr] is handling the sale for me because he knows the cars better than anyone else, his business is best placed to sell them, and I am guaranteed transparency which is important to me.

Bernie Ecclestone's car collection

Bernie Ecclestone's car collection

“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.”

Tom Hartley Jnr said: “This is quite simply the most important race car collection in the world. There has never been and probably never will be a collection like it ever offered for sale again. The collection spans 70 years of Grand Prix and Formula 1 racing, and highlights include Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Michael Schumacher World Championship-winning Ferraris, all of Bernie’s Brabhams including the famous ‘fan car’, and the Vanwall VW10, the car in which the great Stirling Moss won several Formula 1 Grands Prix on the way to Vanwall clinching the first ever Formula 1 Constructors’ World Championship in 1958, plus so much more.

“But, for me, the highlight of the collection has to be the Ferraris. Bernie has assembled a collection of Ferrari Formula 1 cars that today would be near-impossible to repeat. There is the famous Thin Wall Special, which was the first Ferrari to ever beat Alfa Romeo, the Alberto Ascari Italian Grand Prix-winning 375 F1, the Mike Hawthorn World Championship-winning Dino which Ferrari campaigned over three seasons before it was donated to the Henry Ford Museum, plus historically significant World Championship-winning Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher cars.

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“Because Bernie has retained ownership of the Brabhams since they were new, and many of those cars have not been seen for decades, people can forget quite how special a team Brabham was. Brabham scored 22 Formula 1 Grand Prix wins, 24 Formula 1 Grand Prix pole positions, 25 Formula 1 Grand Prix fastest laps, and two Formula 1 World Championships under Bernie’s tenure. The team was also very innovative, fitting carbon brakes to its cars in the 1970s, and was the first to introduce in-race refuelling. Bernie was also the person who gave a young South African engineer named Gordon Murray a job – and other big names in motorsport such as Charlie Whiting and Herbie Blash were part of the Brabham boys.

“I feel very privileged that Bernie has entrusted the sale of his cars to my Tom Hartley Jnr business. Formula 1 cars are cars that I know particularly well, they are not just cars that I have a great personal interest in, but we at Tom Hartley Jnr actively buy and sell them, too. However, there has never been a collection like this one offered for sale, and no one in the world has a race car collection that comes close to Bernie’s. This is a great opportunity for a discerning collector to acquire cars that have never before been offered for sale, and it would be great to see them back on the track again.

“All of the cars on the Formula 1 grid today look the same. If you stripped them of their liveries, you’d struggle to know which one was a Williams and which was a Ferrari. But when you look at some of the Grand Prix cars from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, they’d very much be at home in The Museum of Modern Art.”

“This collection is the history of Formula 1.”

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