Priceless Cars Up for Grabs

Some rare competition cars that have been salted away for decades are coming to market in the near future. A huge stir was created when Tom Hartley Jr announced last month that he had been tasked to sell Bernie Ecclestone’s collection of 69 competition cars. Acquired at various times in the F1 supremo’s career, a large portion of the earlier cars, mostly Ferraris, came from the Albert Obrist collection after Obrist fell on hard times.

Ecclestone was the beneficiary of Obrist’s financial misfortune, as he purchased Obrist’s notes from the bank, effectively gaining ownership of the entire collection. Obrist’s loss of the collection was due to his financial difficulties and the collapse of the speculative Ferrari market. Ecclestone retained the Ferrari F1 cars for himself and sold off the sports cars to other collectors.

Highlights are the Grands Prix Ferraris raced by drivers such as Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Michael Schumacher, and F1 Brabhams raced by Nelson Piquet, Carlos Pace, and, again, Niki Lauda, among them the one-off Brabham-Alfa Romeo BT46B ‘fan car’, which raced only once, to win the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp in 1978 by more than half a minute.

Ecclestone, who is 94, gave his reasons for selling the collection, “I love all 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