Strange silence surrounds Ferrari GTO crash

You’d think that in the wake of an incident popularly deemed the world’s costliest car accident, the interweb would be awash with pictures to go with the news.  This is, after all, an area of interest sufficient to give rise to whole websites of the wreckedexotics.com variety (as per the image here, dating back to 2008), and it takes very little in the way of damage for a suitably credentialled vehicle to get a mention there.

Not so in the case of a well reported recent encounter between a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO and a Hyundai van in the French town of Blois. Under the command of its owner, North Carolina businessman Christopher Cox, the car was en route to Le Mans as part of the 250 GTO 50th Anniversary Tour, when somehow it managed to bury its nose in the side of the van. Details of exactly how and the extent of the damage are sketchy, and it seems mysteriously to have evaded the ubiquitous hordes of mo-pho toting citizen journalists that inevitably converge on such incidents. As New York Times writer Jerry Garrett points out, that’s very odd. After all, a 23-piece rolling Sotheby’s exhibition worth maybe half a billion dollars is nothing if not conspicuous.

And yes, we did say half a billion dollars. To most buffs, the 250 GTO is the Ferrari. It had everything – surreal beauty with power unheard of in its time, care of a 3.0-litre V12 good for an astonishing 220kW (a quarter of a century later, GM and Ford were barely getting that out of V8s pushing twice its capacity), enough to get it to around 280km/h.

Most importantly, because it was only being made for FIA Group 3 GT homologation, only 39 of them were made. That’s why GTOs now fetch in the vicinity of $30 million. In a sign of heady times – GFC? What GFC? – the last decade has seen the car’s value rise tenfold. In May this year, Bloomberg reported that Stirling Moss’s old one fetched US$35 million, and it wasn’t even wearing Ferrari’s trad red.

As Garrett points out, a crash involving a car of that calibre potentially raises all sorts of sticky insurance questions, so perhaps it’s not surprising no one’s talking about it. Christopher Cox and wife Anne, who was with him at the time, have left the phone off the hook. Local authorities and insurers are still investigating, but spokespolice told Garrett that there’s no suggestion of excessive speed, and that the Coxes and the two people in the other car sustained only minor injuries.

Research into the history of the car (care of collectors’ portal site barchetta.cc and coachbuild.com), carrying the chassis number 3445GT, shows this to be its third serious crash. Emerging from the factory in 1962 with a standard Scaglietti body in Ferrari’s iconic red, it made its way to Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata’s Scuderia Serenissima racing team before landing in the hands of Swedish racer Ulf Norinder in 1963 and losing its red duco to Norinder’s patriotic blue with yellow central stripe.

By 1965 it had taken enough dings in a successful racing career to warrant a new suit. It was cheaper to drape it in Drogo bodywork than to keep taking it back to Scaglietti, so it emerged from Drogo’s works in all-new custom metal painted dark blue.

It stayed that way until its next owner, British racing driver Robert Lamplough, piled it up in traffic in 1976. The car was restored to something like original nick with a new replica Series 1 GTO body, retaining the Norinder colours. Passed through several more sets of hands, it landed in the Coxes’ garage in 2005.

While original bodywork is desirable enough to affect value, it isn’t as important as one might think with cars like this, especially when they come with #3445GT’s racing history. What counts is the chassis – as long as it comes out of a crash intact enough to repair with the serial number it bore when it came off the production line, it stays collectible.

What is extraordinary is the proclivity such rare and valuable vehicles have for banging into other things on public roads. Automotive folklore in Sydney alone has two such incidents. First came a Jaguar XJ220, the world’s fastest production when it was launched in 1992, lavished with so much attention on its maiden journey off the boat that the hapless driver rear-ended another car in the Harbour Tunnel. That left a repair shop with less than a fortnight to bang it back into shape in time for its stint at the Sydney International Motor Show, and subsequent appointments with a disabled children’s charity and Elle Macpherson. The dent to the new owner’s wallet was almost as big as the one to his self-regard. Unsurprisingly, he was never publicly identified.

More famously, Australia’s first McLaren F1, bought from the golden handshake of recently retired Coca Cola Amatil chairman Dean Wills, came a gutser at the hands of a mechanic on an unauthorised ‘test drive’ off West Head Road. Said mechanic reportedly kept his job, proving that if knowledge is power, a monopoly on knowledge is power squared.

Which leads us back to wondering about the dearth of knowledge available on the Blois crash...

Picture courtesy wreckedexotics.com

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