his 2000 F1/2000 Race Car sold for $1,689,992, including buyer’s premium, at the Bonhams Monaco auction held on May 15, 2004.
Let’s be realistic: This car has ceased to be a race car. Yes, its owner may go out and drive very, very fast, scaring the bejeebies out of himself and his loved ones. He may even drive it with other cars on the track, but he will never, ever race it. He is not worthy-even the back markers who drive Formula 1 cars for real are supermen who have earned the right to their rides through tremendous talent and effort.
So don’t think of this as a race car, per se; look at it instead as a full-fledged piece of sporting memorabilia, a record-breaking baseball, complete with bat, muscle, bone, and sinew (though emphatically not the vision, reaction time or experience) that made it a piece of history. This car is something you choose to own because you desire it and can afford it, not because you expect to drive it much.
Don’t get me wrong-it’s a fully operational race car. Though you won’t find one on the showroom floor at your local Ferrari store, the factory can and does sell their old F1 cars, for about a million dollars each. They take out the telemetry, upload some “vanilla” software into the engine management system, drop the redline to make the engine live a bit longer, and go to a generic suspension setup-then send them out the door.
Assuming Ferrari likes you well enough to sell you one of these cars in the first place, factory support is available through its Corsa Cliente service, which is based right across the street from the F1 facility. They’re happy to send a crew of qualified mechanics to wherever you’d like, and will make a fuss over you and the car to make sure that everything works right. This is not cheap, but it is available, though from a logistics standpoint it works far better to run the car in Europe than elsewhere in the world.
The first thing you’ve got to do if you want to drive the car is to get in it. Michael Schumacher is not a big man (5 foot, 7 inches, and all of 150 pounds) and they built the car to fit him like a thong. If you’re a standard-sized American male with a six-pack gut rather than abs, forget about it.
I know two people who own late-’90s F1 cars and they tell me that once you wedge yourself behind the wheel, these machines drive extremely well. These days, you don’t win championships in cars that are hard to drive. Of course, there is no experience like driving an F1 car: The sound, the incredible horsepower, the ridiculous braking ability, and the sheer competence of the chassis combine into sensory overload of the best sort.
No matter how good a racer you might be, at nine-tenths of your ability, the car is likely only at six-tenths-at best. Not that you’d want to drive it anywhere near that hard anyway, as the risks and costs associated with failure are simply too great. You don’t want to be the guy who tears the cover off the home run record baseball.
In Europe there is a well-established group that organizes regular events for these cars and does it up right when they do, but in the U.S. you’ll be renting a track, assembling a crew, and going out on your own. The good news is that if you don’t succumb to the red mist, not much on these cars seems to break and with limited use the costs of running aren’t that bad.
If you do have a failure, the solution is simple and always the same: Pack up the car and send it back to Italy. Aside from tires, brake pads, oil, and water, there’s not much you can change on these things yourself. By the way, make sure you know someone who speaks fluent Italian if you need help-English won’t cut it.
Regular readers know that I often look at the relative weightings of “weapons grade” values (i.e., go play with it and have fun) versus “collector grade” values (the investment qualities) in any particular car. As you can see, this car goes so far in the direction of collector grade that even thinking of owning it for its racing potential is delusional. As a collectible, the importance of its provenance is undeniable, and though the 2000 F1/2000 Race Car isn’t yet very old, Schumacher is still rewriting the record books.
So, was this a rational purchase at nearly $1.7 million? Consider that Ferrari Testa Rossas and GTOs sell for six times that much, though these cars come from racing’s “golden age” and are certainly more usable as well.
Perhaps a more appropriate comparison might be something like Mark McGwire’s then record-setting 70th home run baseball, which sold for $3 million in 1999. By that standard, you’d have to call Schumie’s Ferrari a bargain at twice the price. Even coming off McGwire’s bat, a baseball doesn’t go 200 miles per hour.
