The car’s the star

With interest rates low and stock markets uncertain, where are the world’s wealthiest investing their money? Hard to say, but one market bucking the trend of world economic gloom is the historic car market – we’re not talking £10,000 road-going classics, but multi-million-pound historic racing cars. In August, there was a new world record for a car sold at auction: the Ferrari Testa Rossa prototype which fetched a tidy 16.4 million dollars at the Gooding and Company sale, held as part of the annual Monterey and Pebble Beach week in California.

And while this might have been the headline-grabbing car that week, the sheer volume of Ferraris, Porsches, Mercedes and so on fetching 3, 4 or 5 million dollars was eye-watering. And every year, records are beaten. Prices just keep going up.

Can it last? Who knows: like everything, values can go down as well as up. A lot of very wealthy people got their fingers badly burned in the late 1980s – in the historic car market, as well as everywhere else. But at the moment, historic cars seem to be attracting the super-rich like bees to a honey-pot. Perhaps this is partly because of the rise of historic motorsport, with events such as the Goodwood Revival adding huge value to those cars deemed eligible. Ownership of, say, a multi-million-pound Ferrari 250 GTO (pictured) gives you far more than just an investment – it’s a passport to a whole new world. And a lot more fun than a bar of gold.