Former - and much missed - F1 supremo, Bernie Ecclestone has put his fabulous collection of F1 cars up for auction.
Each and every one of Ecclestone's 69 cars is unique, having been stored away from the public gaze, in some cases for more than half a century. Many of the cars have never been seen since Ecclestone purchased them.
Highlights are Ferraris raced by legendary World Champions such as Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Michael Schumacher, and Brabhams raced by Nelson Piquet, Carlos Pace, and, again, Niki Lauda, among them the one-off the fabulous 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.
The late Dr Mike Lawrence was an advisor to Ecclestone when selecting cars for the collection.
"I have been collecting these cars for more than 50 years," said Ecclestone, "and I have only ever bought the best of any example. 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.
"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.
"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."
"This is quite simply the most important race car collection in the world," said Tom Hartley Jnr. "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 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.
"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 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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