A car of stars
Ex-steve Mcqueen 275GTB/4 back in play nine years after making record price
Alife filled with extreme ups and downs, seeing many changes and mixing with actors and racers, an eventual redemption after rocky times, yet most importantly always maintaining an air of essential coolness. We could be talking either about Steve Mcqueen or this Ferrari 275GTB/4, which Mcqueen became the first owner of in 1967 and kept for four years. The GTB/4 is to be offered by RM Sotheby’s at its Monterey sale in August, exactly nine years after it was sold there in 2014 for a record $10,175,000, thanks to the Mcqueen factor. A similar car, possibly in better condition, went for $3.75m at the same sale. The buyer then was the late UK collector David Moores, whose estate is now selling the car.
That price was achieved without the usual roster of requirements of Ferrari collectors being fulfilled. This was a long way from being the clichéd clean-historied car with original panels, spec and paint codes. A combination of star owners and a classic tale of riches to rags and back again means the rulebook gets tossed into the nearest shrubbery.
In fact, the Ferrari’s life started as it would go on. Before Mcqueen even drove it, he had it repainted from its factory Nocciola (light brown) into a specially formulated Chianti Red and fitted with the Borrani wire wheels from his crashed 275GTS/4 NART Spider and an aerodynamic rear-view mirror blended into the driver’s side front wing, racer-style.
In 1971 Mcqueen sold the Ferrari to fellow actor Guy Williams, best remembered as the father in the Sixties Lost in Space TV series. He painted it red then sold it five years later to an LA cop, after which its fortunes went downhill. Following a crash it was sold to the owner of a trucking company who had it converted, rather ironically, into a 275 NART Spider replica, which meant the roof was cut off and it was painted yellow.
It went through three more owners, in several countries, and another colour change, this time to silver, before being
bought by former Le Mans winner Vern Schuppan in 2009. He understood the importance of Mcqueen’s ownership of the car and set about returning it to how it had been in his hands. Schuppan managed to track down many of the parts that had been removed, then sent it to Ferrari Classiche for restoration, which included the reinstatement of Mcqueen’s special touches – that wing-mounted mirror and Borrani wheels. It was even returned to the exact shade of Chianti Red after the original painter, Lee Brown, was able to provide a swatch of the colour used. After that, it was displayed in Ferrari’s museum in Maranello before being auctioned in 2014.
Will it break the record for a Ferrari 275GTB/4 again? RM Sotheby’s has yet to make a guesstimate, but my gut feeling is that it will fall a little short. GTB/4 values are – in dollars at least – about 10 per cent lower than they were in 2014. Even if the Mcqueen multiplication factor remains the same, that would put it in the $9m-$10m range. But we’ll see. rmsothebys.com