250 GTO selling price thread (DUE TO REQUESTS) | Page 2 | FerrariChat

250 GTO selling price thread (DUE TO REQUESTS)

Discussion in 'Vintage Ferrari Market' started by bannishg, Mar 19, 2009.

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  1. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

    Oct 6, 2008
    480
    Springfield area, MA
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    Greg
    You have the prices to accompany those sales? You can get the details of ownership transfer for any of them at the barchetta.cc registry. The purpose of this post is to dig even deeper into these transactions, to unearth the prices. Does the book list the prices?

    Greg B
     
  2. solofast

    solofast Formula 3

    Oct 8, 2007
    1,773
    Indianapolis
    The August of 1966 the "asking price" for 3223 was $4000....

    I don't know what the final selling price was, but it was close to that if not 4k... Car was sold thru German Motors of WPB Fla and German Motors got a big cut off the top for the repair of the nose and storage fees after it ended up in the sandbank at Sebring.
     
  3. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    Greg
    #28 bannishg, Mar 19, 2009
    Last edited: Mar 19, 2009
    I understand that you may not want to share some details on a count of the owners' privacy, and I already stated that it's fine, but are you implying that if I had never accidentally posted the comment that you would've provided details, corrections and new data until our cups runneth over? I hope, on behalf of myself, but especially on behalf of the other interested F-chatters that this isn't the case. It's as if we are poisoned, and you have the antidote in hand, dangling it around, teasing us, but you refuse to revive us or even diagnose us (although the severity of the matter at hand is not quite as dire). As Dave said, you are one of the very few people on the planet with prodigious knowledge on this, the world's finest sports car. Some of the information you may have may not be obtainable anywhere else on the planet. Unless the information is classified for some reason, please consider sharing some valuable information with us.

    Regards,
    Greg
     
  4. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    Greg
    Awesome! Thank You!
     
  5. tritone

    tritone F1 Veteran
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    Dec 8, 2003
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    4153GT -2000 - Charles R. Grohe - $6,500,000

    isn't the correct name "Christoph Grohe", a Swiss collector/dealer?


    Tritone
     
  6. Jeff Kennedy

    Jeff Kennedy F1 Veteran
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    Oct 16, 2007
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    4757 - the $40K was by Stollenwerk to Chris Cord.

    You may also want to try getting input from Mike Sheehan as he was active in some of the transactions.

    Jeff
     
  7. RMV

    RMV F1 Veteran

    Apr 11, 2002
    7,371
    ... and some have been sacrificed to become replicas! :)
     
  8. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

    Oct 6, 2008
    480
    Springfield area, MA
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    Greg


    Some of these transactions I have obtained information from, are, in fact, from Sheehan. He has got to be one of the coolest, nicest guys in the business. He was busy at the time I inquired, but was still able to provide me with a wealth of info, even still it was probably only the tip of the iceberg. I may request some more data from him soon. I still have a feeling that Mr. Noon will come around and contribute.

    Jeff, you have been a tremendous help to this post thus far, and I thank you. Don't be afraid to make any edits, additions, deletions etc. that you find necessary.

    Thanks to all, and keep it coming!

    GB
     
  9. yale

    yale Formula Junior

    May 2, 2004
    744
    New York City
    Here is an article from Nov. 2002 on sale prices:

    Rare Ferrari 250 GTO Lures Car Buffs on a Million-Dollar Quest

    By A. Craig Copetas

    London, Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The year was 1989, and Malcolm Barber looked out his window at the rain rattling the Christmas lights strung up outside Sotheby's Auction House. Barber was rubbing an ivory gavel, thinking about the wet drive home, when his secretary put through an unexpected transatlantic phone call.

    On the line was Robert M. Rubin, vice president of commodity operations at Drexel Burnham Lambert Trading Corp., the precious- metals trading arm of the soon-to-collapse company that made junk bonds famous.

    ``Rubin asked me to sell the Holy Grail,'' Barber says.

    The chalice placed in the auctioneer's hands: a Ferrari 250 GTO, one of only 36 built by the Italian automaker between 1962 and 1964. The wholesale factory price then of Enzo Ferrari's first Gran Turismo Berlinetta Competition GTO was $9,700. Earlier this year, Chip Connor, president of the Hong Kong investment company William E. Connor & Associates Ltd., paid $9 million a GTO, driving off in a street-legal race car that comes with a bare aluminum floor and plastic sliding windows.

    The details of Rubin's auction, recounted by Rubin, who is retired, and Barber, now a group managing director at the London auction house Bonhams, illustrate the intrigue and passion behind an investment that first drove off the showroom floor with a sticker price of $13,600.

    Forty years later, the Ferrari 250 GTO is an asset so secretly held that Peter Everingham, secretary of the Ferrari Owners Club of Great Britain, says his club's by-laws forbid him under threat of legal action to reveal the name of any owner or how much they paid for the vehicle.

    Rubin and Barber were set to shatter the unwritten rule of the elite and secretive GTO market, launching a global marketing campaign to sell one. A few weeks before Rubin instructed Barber to put his car on a jumbo jet and take it on a global marketing tour, another red GTO was privately sold to a Japanese investor for $13,837,500.

    `Shadowy Business'

    This is a hot car.

    ``The GTO without doubt is the most significant race car ever built,'' says Tim Watson, the public-affairs director at Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd., Ferrari's chief competitor on the luxury race- car circuit.

    Today, all traffic in the 3-liter, V-12 race car is conducted in silence among a coterie of executives such as McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. President Bruce McCaw and Disposable Softgoods Holdings Ltd. Chairman Brandon Wang. The auction of the Rubin GTO, as it would turn out, was the last time that proof of a sale price would be recorded in public.

    ``The private GTO market is a shadowy business full of malicious rumors and I needed to change that playing field,'' Rubin says. ``Creditors at the time were after Drexel and I was in the midst of a divorce. I wanted to cut off the negative chit-chat that Drexel's creditors and Mrs. Rubin would be coming after potential buyers of my GTO.''

    Circus Tent

    Nonetheless, Rubin says his decision to offer the car in a public spotlight sparked a backfire among other GTO owners and brokers.

    ``I still receive lots of goofy calls from people who didn't want me to sell the car at auction,'' Rubin says. ``There was no way my GTO would sell for more than $13 million. Everyone in the market knew it and they were nervous because the sale would lower the value of their cars and create a bear market.

    ``The GTO is like a security,'' Rubin adds. ``There is a lot of volatility and turnover and a lunatic fringe.''

    On May 21, 1990, fleets of private helicopters arrived in Monte Carlo, their passengers scrambling across the waterfront landing pad and into a circus tent owned by Prince Rainier -- who was present. Barber opened the bidding at $2.5 million. Hundreds of hands shot skyward, including those of the 11 phone operators charged with signaling the bids of billionaires who preferred to remain invisible.

    ``I was no longer an auctioneer,'' Barber recalls. ``I was a referee.''

    No Speedometer

    Four minutes into the fray, Swedish real-estate magnate Hans Thulin nodded his head.

    ``The car is selling for $10.5 million,'' Barber informed his audience. He thumped the gavel. ``A murmur of disappointment immediately filled the tent,'' Rubin says. ``GTO owners had come to the auction believing their cars were worth at least $15 million and didn't think $10.5 million was a lot of money.''

    Barber then sealed the deal. ``The car is sold for $10.5 million,'' he said, confirming the current benchmark price for a car that comes with wire door handles. There is no speedometer.

    Holy Grail

    ``The Ferrari 250 GTO is the Holy Grail and the most expensive race car in the world,'' says Mick Maggio, who spent 11 years as a bond trader at Nikko Securities and Swedish bank SEB AB before becoming a race-car instructor at PalmerSports in the U.K.

    A handful of GTO owners and brokers familiar with these private transactions and the identities of the some 300 individuals who have over the past four decades owned any of the 36 cars agreed to speak about their trades, although many only on the condition that they not be identified.

    Like all treasure hunts, looking for a GTO involves a secret map, this one drawn by a Frenchman who lives on the shore of the Andaman Sea. Shortly before Jess Pourret in 1987 sold his GTO and moved to Thailand, he assembled the histories of all the cars and published their provenances in ``Ferrari 250 GTO,'' a rare book that Barber says can command as much as $1,000 at auction.

    The interviews and published records offer a glimpse into the garages of hot rodders such as fashion designer Ralph Lauren, who paid $650,000 in 1985 for a red GTO branded with the chassis serial number 3987GT. ``All GTOs trade very privately,'' explains Microsoft Corp. board member Jon Shirley, who bought a red one three years ago and says he didn't pay $10 million for it.

    ``That's a ridiculous price,'' the former Microsoft president says with a laugh. ``Many owners and brokers like to inflate the price.''

    No wonder. ``The GTO is the most desirable Ferrari ever made and there are only 33 of us who own them,'' Shirley adds. ``It's more of a fun investment than watching boring stocks.''

    Took It Apart

    Also presently able to sit behind a GTO wooden steering wheel and the factory-installed bug deflector are Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Chairman S. Robson Walton ($3.5 million in 1994) and West Tech Energy Inc. President Ed Davies ($3.8 million in 1995). Other owners include Japanese property baron Yoshikuni Okamato; Washington lawyer Bernie Carl; former Microsoft programmer Greg Whitten; Tommy Hilfiger, founder and honorary chairman of Tommy Hilfiger Corp. and Cincinnati Microwave Inc. President Jim Jaeger. In Kobe, Japan, property baron Yoshio Matsuta, chairman of Vintagecars Co. Ltd., has three GTOs, in green, blue and red. These owners prefer driving to talking and either didn't return phone calls or declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg.

    Hushed Sales

    ``GTOs are sold quietly by billionaires who don't like their affairs to be known,'' Ferrari Club secretary Everingham says. ``Perhaps the only thing faster than its acceleration is its fluctuation rate.''

    In 1964, for instance, Texas oilman Tom O'Connor donated his dark blue $15,000 GTO to a high school for students to take apart as an instructive exercise. Eight years later, the school auctioned it for approximately $6,000, the car's records show.

    A bearish Rubin reckons that Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, who in 1978 paid $86,000 for his GTO, might today get $5 million for the car. A bullish Barber suspects Mason's red GTO could sell for between $8 million and $9 million.

    Hand Signals

    ``I don't think we're going to be able to help,'' Mason's assistant Julia Grinter said when asked if the rock musician would talk about his investment, which is best run with ear plugs and comes without a sound system.

    ``I only wear plugs when I race,'' Microsoft's Shirley says. ``But when my wife and I go out for a drive we have to communicate with hand signals.''

    Despite the collective hush among GTO owners, their asset is anything but static.

    ``To own one and not drive it in a rally defeats the point of purchasing the car,'' explains GTO hunter Simon Kidston, president of Bonhams Europe SA in Geneva. ``You do not mollycoddle a GTO.''

    Gerald Rousch, a former university professor of ancient art and civilization, says buying a GTO right now for $8 million would be a bargain. He should know. For the past 27 years, Rousch has published the Ferrari Market Report, a 40-page, biweekly magazine of classified ads devoted to the sale of used Ferraris.

    A Ballerina

    The magazine has 3,800 subscribers and 33 of them are GTO owners.

    ``Nobody ever has placed an ad in the report looking to buy or sell a GTO,'' says Rousch, who maintains an index of every Ferrari ever made. ``It's just not done.''

    Ferrari broker Michael Sheehan says financing is the easy part.

    ``All you need is a pulse for a bank to give you loan on a GTO,'' says the president of European Auto Sales Inc. in Newport Beach, California. ``I could have bought one in the early 1970s for a few grand, but I was in love with a ballerina just as beautiful and used the money to take her to Europe.''

    Designed by Giotto Bizzarrini at the Ferrari atelier in Maranello, most of the 300-horsepower GTOs left the stable with a bold white racing stripe painted down their centers, all 36 of them tuned to drive the 24-hour race at Le Mans and other international competitions. The late Enzo Ferrari personally vetted each of the original owners.

    `Members of the Club'

    ``From the very beginning, Ferrari cloaked the GTO in the sorts of myths and mysteries that keep the car an astonishingly valuable object, as desired as any painting by Picasso or Van Gogh,'' Barber says.

    And like the art world, Rubin says the GTO owners live in a hierarchical society, with power concentrated in the hands of those whose cars have had the fewest owners and won the most races during the GTO's halcyon years on the professional racing circuit.

    Ralph Lauren's GTO, for example, wouldn't likely sell for more than $3 million because Pourret's book records that the car never raced at Le Mans and can't boast its original engine or body. The leader of the pack is Chip Connor, whose red $9 million GTO (serial number 4293GT) remains factory-fresh, averaged 181 kilometers-per-hour at Le Mans and sped to victory at races in France, Italy and Germany.

    Still, Rubin says the GTO's ability to mesmerize executives isn't the result of its rarity.

    ``Thirty-six competition cars is quite a lot,'' he explains. ``That there are so many GTOs is what makes them valuable. If an owner has financial trouble, he has the reassurance of seeing the cars privately change hands among other members of the club.''

    Record Price

    Blowouts do happen. Copies of bank records from the Midland Bank in London indicate that Sheehan, according to sales records, privately brokered the 1989 sale of a GTO (serial number 3909GT) to Japanese car collector Takeo Kato for a record price of $13,837,500.

    On Aug. 25, 1994, John Collins, chairman of Talacrest Ltd. in the U.K., the biggest Ferrari dealership in Europe, privately bought Kato's GTO over the phone for $2.7 million.

    ``You could say the GTO market crashed that morning, but Kato didn't care that he lost money,'' Collins says.
     
  10. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

    Oct 6, 2008
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    Greg
    Excellent info, Yale!
    I actually have this article somewhere, but have lost track of it, lot of good dirt in here!
    Thanks, man!

    Greg
     
  11. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

    Oct 6, 2008
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    Greg
    Any objections to adding prototype #2643 to the list? I just found an ad for it from 1980. Let me know.

    Greg
     
  12. of2worlds

    of2worlds F1 World Champ
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    You can never know too much. It only becomes a problem when YOU think that you DO. Yes more please!
    CH
     
  13. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    #38 bannishg, Mar 22, 2009
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 7, 2017
    How 'bout we let this classified from Autoweek 5-26-80 do the talking? On a side note, I think one of the GTO62's sold for around $180,000 around this time.
    Image Unavailable, Please Login
     
  14. 246tasman

    246tasman Formula 3

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    #39 246tasman, Mar 22, 2009
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2009
    What an inventory! That's the best old ad I've seen yet. I'll take the lot.
     
  15. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

    Oct 6, 2008
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    Greg
    That ad is nothing compared to one of them I posted in my other thread, from August 1970.
     
  16. 246tasman

    246tasman Formula 3

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    Will Tomkins
    What post #?
     
  17. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    Greg
  18. 246tasman

    246tasman Formula 3

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    Will Tomkins
  19. Arvin Grajau

    Arvin Grajau Seven Time F1 World Champ
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    as Jenks would say "Boiled Lollies"
     
  20. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    #45 bannishg, Mar 22, 2009
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2009
    Yea that's the one I meant. May I ask which models suit your personal taste? I'll see if I have another ad with such cars and post it. I bet it's because there are no S/N's listed.

    I just think that it doesn't get any better than $3700 SWB Californias, $7700 GTOs and $8500 LM's.

    Greg
     
  21. Birel

    Birel Formula 3

    Sep 12, 2005
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    4293 moved from Patrick Ma to Chip Connor a couple of years ago. No-one knows the price, but it would surely have been plenty.
     
  22. 246tasman

    246tasman Formula 3

    Jun 21, 2007
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    You can maybe see that the 50s racers + GTO & 206S rock my boat. If you can find a time machine, send me another ad by all means!
     
  23. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    I have a few, but to keep this post strictly GTO, I'll post any findings in my other thread.
     
  24. 246tasman

    246tasman Formula 3

    Jun 21, 2007
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    Thanks! They're great reading. What about the time machine?
     
  25. bannishg

    bannishg Formula Junior

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    Greg
    The time machine will cost you $20 Million USD or swap for a GTO.
     

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