Former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone has put his entire collection of Formula 1 and Grand Prix cars up for sale - and is set to rake in "hundreds of millions" pounds.
The 69-car set includes cars previously unseen since purchased by Ecclestone, with highlights including Ferraris raced by world champions Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Michael Schumacher.
Former Brabham boss Ecclestone also has cars from the team, including the one-off Brabham-Alfa Romeo BT46B, otherwise known as the ‘fan car’ Its only race secured it victory in the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp in 1978.
The sale is overseen by specialist Tom Hartley Jnr Ltd, one of the world’s most respected and exclusive high-end dealers in classic and historic sports cars and racing cars.
Explaining his reasoning to sell, Ecclestone, 94, said: "I have been collecting these cars for more than 50 years, and I have only ever bought the best of any example," said Ecclestone. "Whilst many other collectors have opted for sports cars over the years, 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."
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Hartley Jr has described Ecclestone's collection as "quite simply the most important in the world".
He added: "There has never been, and probably never will be, a collection like it ever offered for sale again."
With the collection spanning 70 years of Grand Prix and Formula 1 racing, Hartley Jr said: "There are many eight-figure cars within the collection, and the value of the collection combined is well into the hundreds of millions.
"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 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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