Driving Cars Worth . . . Millions

Posted Today 03:47 PM by Arthur St. Antoine



Friends and I were having dinner the other night when, incredibly, the subject of cars came up. "What's the most valuable car you ever drove?" someone asked. Immediately I knew the answer, but the query made me pause nonetheless.

In this business of testing and reviewing cars, sticker price matters, of course. Return on the dollar is a huge factor in our road tests and, even more so, in comparisons. Witness Hyundai clobbering Lexus in our July issue -- $34,695 Veracruz is 95 percent as good as $39,515 RX 350? Hey, no brainer: The Hyundai wins.

On the other hand, to drive the cars we drive on a regular basis requires a certain . . . sticker-price indifference. How else could you probe the handling characteristics of a CLK63 AMG Black Series worth $135,000? Or study the braking power of a $196,000 Bentley Continental GTC? Or test the stability-control system on a $280,000 Ferrari 599GTB? Sure, you respect the value of these rolling investment portfolios, you drive them with care, but at a certain point each one is just another piece of metal, a machine that needs to be analyzed -- whether it's worth $25,000 or $250,000.


Working in our favor is the sheer volume of cars we drive. Price tags that would send any of us into fits if we were making a purchase are routine in the testing bay. Why, there are six cars worth more than $60,000 sitting in the MT garage right now. Earlier this year I drove a Mercedes SLR McLaren 722 Edition worth nearly $500,000. Some time before that I spent a day at the wheel of the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing once owned by Clark Gable. Value: around $750,000. And then there were the high-speed blitzes in a very generous (or foolhardy) fellow's $1.2 million Ferrari Enzo. And the laps around Italy's Mugello race circuit in the even rarer Ferrari FXX -- which goes for, oh, nearly $2 mil.


That's not even mentioning the concept cars, drives in one-of-a-kind prototypes worth -- I don't know -- millions. For example, I spent a full day in the California desert, on public roads, driving Dodge's one-of-a-kind Challenger show car. Trust me: Making a mistake at the wheel was the least of my concerns. Not only did I focus on every motorist who came within 100 yards with the flinty stare of Clint Eastwood sizing up a motley posse riding into town, I also constantly scanned the skies above -- lest, say, an inattentive vulture accidentally crash-land on that priceless hood and send Dodge into bankruptcy.


But all of them -- the Ferraris, the Dodge Challenger concept, the more recent Giugiaro Mustang show car -- pale in comparison to the most valuable car I ever drove: a 1931 Type 41 Bugatti Royale, one of only six ever made and perhaps the grandest automobile of all time. This particular Royale, the so-called "Berline de Voyage," had been Ettore Bugatti's personal car until his death in 1947. At the time I drove it, in the late 80s, it had just been purchased by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, for a reported $8.1 million -- making it the most expensive car in the world. (At least at the time. In 1991 Monaghan sold his Royale -- apparently for slightly less than he paid for it -- and the car has since been sold again. It's now reportedly in the hands of a Korean owner.)


How do you test-drive the single most valuable car in the whole wide world? That's right: very, very carefully. Do a little math and the sweat will begin pouring from your palms, too. If, say, a $25,000 Honda gets into a fender-bender and has its right-front crushed, it might cost, oh, $2500 to straighten up the body panels -- 10 percent of the purchase price. Say I'd whanged the Royale into a parking post and crushed its right-front side, too. At a similar 10 percent fix-it cost . . . "Here's your bill for $810,000, Mr. St. Antoine. Thanks for v