Is The Ecclestone Collection the Most Significant Group of Race Cars Ever Offered for Sale?

Former racing “Supremo,” Bernie Ecclestone, to sell his extensive collection of historically significant Grand Prix and Formula 1 cars via a British specialist.

Love him or hate him, without Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One would not be the worldwide phenomenon it is today. The billionaire racing impresario, who turned 94 a little over a month ago, parlayed a side hustle as a driver manager in the 1950s into becoming the de facto boss of all of Formula One by the late 1980s. During his nearly 70 years in the motor racing business, he amassed a truly impressive collection of 69 historic grand prix and F1 cars  that are now offered for sale by Tom Hartley Jnr, a U.K.-based specialist in the sale of sports, exotic, and rare automobiles. When you start to see the list of competition cars offered, Hartley’s notion that “The Ecclestone Grand Prix Collection” is “the most important racing car collection in the world” does not seem all that boastful.

Ecclestone got his start in business selling motorcycle parts and later motorcycles and used cars. His own career behind the wheel in the 1950s included a handful of Formula 3 races before a shunt motivated him to walk away as a driver. He later returned as a team manager, first for British driver Stuart Lewis-Evans in 1957 and then German-Austrian driver Jochen Rindt in the 1960s. By 1972, he had become the principal owner of Brabham, the race car builder and F1 team found by Jack Brabham in 1960.

Brabham Innovation and F1 Takeover

Through the 1970s, Brabham remained largely competitive, particularly after Ecclestone promoted a young Gordon Murray to the position of chief designer. Murray’s innovative designs, such as the BT46B “fan car,” which used a massive fan at the rear to create suction underneath for additional downforce, helped Brabham move up in the constructor’s standings. By the early 1980s, Brabham was very competitive, with Nelson Piquet winning the driver’s championship for Ecclestone’s team in 1981 and 1983. Having invested the equivalent of $250,000 to purchase Brabham in 1972, he sold the team in 1988 for $5 million.

Following his appointment as head of the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA) in 1978, Ecclestone had spent much of this period garnering control of Formula One racing, eventually winning the right to negotiate worldwide television rights for the series by the early 1980s. Though he faced battles with both the sport’s governing body in the form of the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile and the team owners in FOCA, he ultimately prevailed. Amazingly, for an entity he never really purchased, Ecclestone was able to sell his controlling stake in the Formula One Group. The $8 billion sale to Liberty Media (the same entity that also owns Sirius XM and Live Nation Entertainment) netted Ecclestone at least $2 billion. Today his net worth is estimated at somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion, even following a recent $822 million tax fraud settlement with the U.K. government.

During his remarkably successful career, which also included real estate and soccer investments, Ecclestone built a collection of single-seat race cars that appears to be unequaled by a private collector. Some 28 of the 69-car collection are Brabhams that have never been offered for sale, racers that he simply held onto over the years, including that groundbreaking (“groundsucking?”) fan car. The BT46B won the only race it competed in before Ecclestone withdrew the car, a rare diplomatic move for F1’s “Supremo” who did not want to tick off the other members of the budding FOCA at the time. The 1981 BT49C and 1983 BT52 that each carried Piquet to the title are also part of the offering. But there are other cars in the collection with significant history from other constructors.

Take the 1958 Vanwall VW10 in the collection, a car that Stirling Moss drove to victory at the Dutch and Portuguese Grands Prix that year. Ecclestone’s client, Lewis-Evans died in a sister car while driving for Vanwall at the season-ending Morocco Grand Prix that year.

Significant Ferraris in the Collection

While the Brabhams outnumber the other makes in the collection, there is a notable selection of Ferraris as well, such as the Ferrari Dino 246 (not to be confused with the later Dino 246 GT sports car) that Mike Hawthorn piloted while winning the 1958 F1 title, the first for a British driver. Hawthorn earned that title by just one point over Moss in his Vanwall, despite Moss winning four races to Hawthorn’s lone victory in France. The 246 can boast of other superlatives, such as the first F1 car to have a V6 engine as well as the last front-engined F1 car to secure the driver’s title. It is reported that Ecclestone has owned the car for nearly 30 years.  

Other championship-winning Ferraris in the collection include a 312T that Niki Lauda drove to win the title in 1975 and an F2002 that Michael Schumacher used en route to 11 wins in 17 races in 2002, when he never once finishing off the podium. This particular chassis powered Schumacher to one win and teammate Rubens Barichello to two others.

Lauda’s ’75 312T won its class at Pebble Beach in 2017. Ecclestone acquired the 312T in 2019, the year it sold at Gooding & Company’s Pebble Beach auction for $6,000,000. The 1951 Ferrari 375 that Alberto Ascari drove to Ferrari’s first two ever Formula 1 wins at the Italian and German Grands Prix is also on the list. It’s actually quite a challenge to consider any specific car in the massive collection as the “featured” machine, since nearly every one of the cars would make headlines were it included in any other sale. The oldest car in the collection is a 1931 Bugatti Type 54S. A 1937 Mercedes-Benz W125, one of the so-called “Silver Arrows” that dominated the sport in the 1930s, has already been sold from the collection.

Rather than an auction, the cars of the Bernie Ecclestone Grand Prix Collection are being offered as private, individual sales, though we can only imagine what sort of deep pockets it would take to acquire the collection outright. Estimates have varied from as low as £100 million to as much £300 million for the entire collection’s value. Given that the sales are being privately conducted, we will likely never know the true amount. But we can hold out hope that the new owners of these cars—many of which have not been publicly seen since they were last raced—will enter them in vintage events, either on track or on the show field.

Ecclestone’s wife and daughters are apparently little interested in taking over the collection for the nonagenarian, who says, “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 that’s why I have decided to sell them. After collecting and owning them for so long, I would like to know where they’ve gone and not leave them for my wife to deal with should I not be around.” Sound advice, whether your collection is valued at $10,000, $100,000 or even several hundred million dollars.

For a sneak peek, check out this promotional video from Hartley.

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