Cruise and collect…

8th July 2011

By Anthony Peacock

The world is full of strange collectors. Most of the time it’s just innocent fun, apart from the small band of psychopaths who mostly collect body parts. But leaving those people aside, some of the more esoteric collections I’ve come across recently include seawater (water from every sea in the world), airline sick bags (see http://www.sicksack.com), stuffed hummingbirds (apparently popular in Victorian times) and parking tickets (the jewel in the crown being one issued by the government of Lichtenstein).

Then there are those with car collections. More or less every driver of note has one, particularly the legends of the past. Didier Auriol has a Delta Integrale among his fleet stashed in the south of France, while Juha Kankkunen actually built a museum back home in Finland. Then there are those who are proudly unsentimental, such as Michele Mouton (who drives a modern Audi but has never actually owned one of the iconic Quattros) and Markku Alen, who sees no point in keeping any old rally cars whatsoever because “they break all the time”. There are those who like to go back to their roots, such as the late Colin McRae, who had his old Talbot Sunbeam restored as well as his very first motocross bike before salting them away in his castle in Scotland, and others by contrast who collect the cars that they would have liked to have driven, such as Kimi Raikkonen and his DTM-specification Mercedes.

Some drivers simply keep their old cars for ages, such as Petter Solberg and his ancient rallycross Volvo 240, while others turn over their cars with hectic regularity, such as Sebastien Loeb, who has already got through a Lamborghini Gallardo and a Porsche 997 GT3 among his frequently changing fleet of road cars.

But forget the run of the mill exotica. The most fascinating collections of all are always the obscure ones. Former driver and Mitsubishi supremo Andrew Cowan, for example, is amassing a small gathering of Hillman Imps: a car that ironically nearly did for the title hopes of Tommi Makinen in 1998 by depositing a load of oil at Millbrook. Then there’s a club in London that specialises in veteran hearses (the ‘Callaway Corpseshifter’ being one of the most iconic models, from America) not to mention those people who unfathomably choose to collect cars such as the Austin Princess or Allegro: tributes to the work ethic and build quality that brought British manufacturing industry to its knees in the 1970s.

The very best car collection in the world? It’s probably a toss-up between the Schlumpf collection in France, which is like Disneyworld for Bugattis, or the private collection of the Jordanian Royal Family. What’s best about the Amman-based museum is its sheer diversity: where else would you get a bullet-proof limousine housed next to one of the very first gullwing Mercedes built in the world and a Group A Ford Escort Cosworth? King Hussein of Jordan was a man with tastes so Catholic, he made the Pope look like a Lutheran in comparison. Now, has anybody got a collection of historic Popemobiles out there? That would be worth seeing…