Photo credit: Derek Hatfield
Here’s a question for you to mull over for a couple of minutes. Would you buy a fantastic car at a good price knowing that it had a famous previous owner you didn’t like?
This question came to my mind when I saw that a Ferrari 458 Italia once owned by Chris Evans is on sale at the decent looking price of £18,950. Oh, hang on a second. It’s actually £189,950, is it? Not quite so tempting any more then really.
I don’t actually have anything against Christopher James Evans, even though he is probably the only person in the world who can challenge Chris Moyles to the title of “Person With The Biggest Distance Between Their Own Perception of How Funny They Are And The Reality”.
But what if the car was previously owned by someone you really hated or, even worse, an infamous murderer or despot? Would you drive Franco’s old Limo, Mussolini’s second hand Alfa Romeo or JR Ewing’s Cadillac? It seems like a question of scruples to me and I certainly wouldn’t do it if the car was instantly recognisable.
I am Just Nipping Out in the Hitlermobile for Some Milk
Can you imagine driving along in a convertible Mercedes 770 covered in swastikas? Apparently a Russian collector / madman paid $8 million to get Hitler’s old car, although I wonder if he ever pops down to the shops in it.
Back to Evans though, and if you really want to know then his Ferrari has a little over 5,500 miles on the clock, has had at least one careful owner (yeah, right) and a fetching aubergine colour. At the risk of digressing again, does anyone know why Americans call aubergines eggplants? Would they describe this vehicle as eggplant colored? That just sounds weird, although even weirder is the fact that the eggplant is actually a berry and a close relative of tobacco.
After all this eggplant based weirdness I can only say that it is a dangerous game looking at cars from famous and infamous people. Unless you are a mad Russian billionaire with a taste for swastikas that is.