The 1957 Ferrari 335S Spider Scaglietti won the 1957 Constructors’ World Championship.
What does this mean? Who knows, but the two winners out of this $US35.8 million ($50.5m) sale were Artcurial boss Matty Lamoure, who walked away with a serious commission, and the car’s former owner, Alessandro Proto.
Alessandro is one of those Italian characters who makes our Clive Palmer look like a librarian. He claims to be the inspiration for Christian Grey in the 50 Shades of Grey novels but says that unlike CG, AP is not into S&M.
Artcurial says the car was actually owned by French Ferrari collector Pierre Bardinon.
Pierre was in the rich-father business and built the most important Ferrari collection in the world with 70 cars covering Enzo’s first 25 years. Pierre also liked a drink and had an equally great collection of Grand Crus. Best of all he built his own 3km racetrack around his house. He died in 2012.
Anyway, Alessandro claims the car’s buyer is the Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi.
Lionel is no shrinking violet himself. Ranked as the world’s top player, the greatest of all time (well after Sam Kekovich) and the most highly paid player ($150,000 a day before sponsorships), Lionel is worth about $330m. But he’s a mummy’s boy at heart or shoulder. He has a tatt of mum Celia’s face on his left shoulder.
Still in the small-flower stakes, he has a long way to go to catch up on supposed Ferrari underbidder Christiano Ronaldo, who gave his agent Jorge Mendes a Greek island for a wedding present.
Not that Greek Islands are that big a deal. You can buy Kythnos, an hour from Athens, for $5.6m, or the price of a one bedder in St Kilda.
The agent Chris Krolow from Private Islands tells me that coming ashore at Kythnos you “immediately notice the happy and smiling faces of the people who live on the island all year long as they welcome you. Fresh fish and local delicacies (cheese, goat, sausages, and wine) are waiting to be tasted.” Well that’s a step up on St Kilda, where cheese, goat, sausages and happy faces are hard to come by at the Espy.
Back to the Ferrari. This is the car that saw Ferrari win the 1957 Constructors’ World Championship.
Now you wouldn’t buy this Spider unless you were pretty handy on the tools. One of four, it came with 290kW, four-cams, double ignition and six Weber carburettors. Expect to pay a grand for each distributor cap and close to ten for a tune up.
Driving one of these at speed with drum brakes is better left to experts such as Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn and Alessandro Proto.
As Ferrari itself says “the 335 S made its debut at the infamous 1957 Mille Miglia with Alfonso De Portago replacing an unwell Luigi Musso at the wheel at the last minute. The car was lying third when tragedy struck near Guidizzolo, killing De Portago, his co-driver Edmund Nelson and 14 spectators.”
This is a shortened version of the original article. Read the rest at The Australian by clicking here.
