SO, YOU WANT TO BUY AN F1 CAR

The world's most comprehensive collection of retired Grand Prix racing cars – likely valued at more than $250 million – is about to be sold.

It is the personal collection of the former Formula One ringmaster, Bernie Ecclestone.

'Mr E', as he was known during his decades as the undisputed leader of F1, is now 94 and living in Brazil with his wife Fabiana Flosi and their young son, Ace.

He has housed his car collection for many years in a top-secret storage hanger at Biggin Hill, the former World War II fighter airfield which Ecclestone bought and used for a range of F1 activities including television production.

The line-up includes everything from a 1937 Auto Union through a 1987 Brabham-BMW BT52 – which Nelson Piquet took to a world title when Ecclestone owned Brabham – to a range of more-recent racers.

A total of 69 cars will be sold by the British specialist company, Tom Hartley Jnr Limited.

“I have been collecting these cars for more than 50 years, and I have only ever bought the best of any example. My passion has always been for Grand Prix and Formula 1 cars," said Ecclestone.

“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.

"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.”

"The collection spans 70 years of Grand Prix and Formula 1 racing, and highlights include Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Michael Schumacher World Championship-winning Ferraris, all of Bernie’s Brabhams including the famous ‘fan car’, and the Vanwall VW10, the car in which the great Stirling Moss won several Formula 1 Grands Prix on the way to Vanwall clinching the first ever Formula 1 Constructors’ World Championship in 1958, plus so much more," said Tom Hartley Jnr.

"But, 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 collection is the history of Formula 1.

“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."