A Ferrari 250 GTO fitted with a Chevy Engine?

The anniversary rally of the Ferrari 250 GTO

Last year the Italian marque celebrated 70 years of Ferrari with an extremely, grandiose anniversary year with an indefinite number of thoroughbred Ferrari's and some prestigious major events around the world. On September 20th, 2017 a rally of twenty Ferrari 250 GTO`s arrived in Maranello to honour the 55th birthday of one of its most famous motorcars, which was born in 1962. I asked a friend, Christopher Renwick, one of the leading personalities for purchasing valuables motorcars, to give me his opinion about this beautiful motor car. Read my interview here:

My Chit-Chat with the Investment Car Guru

I took the occasion of the 55th-anniversary rally in Italy to have a look back to the sixties when the Ferrari 250 GTO wasn't one of the most collectable motor-vehicles.

In my little Chit-Chat with Christopher Renwick- the Investment Car Guru he shares some private details about his obsession with the utmost admirable racing car- the  Ferrari 250 GTO.

Whichever was the first car you have purchased?     

The first  Ferrari 250 GTO I bought was in Italy, Chassis 3413 a 64 bodied car for an Englisch dealer and subsequent friend Dan Margulies. I was so impressed by the looks and performance of the car that GTO's became an obsession!
JUL: What made your customer believe to chose the Ferrari 250 GTO?

In the late 1960`s I had a very valued customer and a friend called John Calley, he was president of Warner Brother pictures, and in later years President of Sony Corp. He was more of a friend more than a mentor. He loved automobiles and any aspect of the automobile industry. Most of his cars were modern cars such as the latest Mercedes, Maserati or Ferrari road cars. One day he asked me very seriously, "If I were to want to buy cars purely for investment, what should I buy?"- I thought about this for some time. My conclusion was that the car had to be beautiful, derivable rare, and immediately recognizable. I gave John several possibilities. Three or four of them pre-war and one post-war. His response was that the pre-war cars were out of the equation, as he had been brought up on automatic or totally synchromesh gearboxes and disk brakes, hence his preference for the one post-war car. The Ferrari GTO!

 What was the buying budget you had?      

My feeling was that, whatever the asking price was, the value was around $6,000 for each car. This was probably around 1967. So this was our buying budget. Today`s the current valuation of the Ferrari 250 GTO is around 60 million US Dollars, a 10,000 fold return.

 A GTO fitted with a Chevy Engine, what did you do here?     

I managed to buy five cars for John. One fitted with a Chevrolet Corvette engine and gearbox, the owners' rationale for this sacrilegious modification was that the Chevy engine was lighter and more powerful, the gearbox was unbreakable and last but not least, his local gas station could service the car. Luckily he had kept the Ferrari engine and gearbox. Another car came with the engine of another Ferrari. With some hunting around I managed to buy the Ferrari 250 GTO, it had been swapped and the engines were returned to their rightful cars. I can`t remember the chassis numbers now but I am sure diligent researchers can find them. John encumbered to temptation and when they doubled in value three or so years on, he sold them.

 Do you remember to some of the Ferrari GTO deals you did?        

 
I have been involved in a number of GTO deals. The first that comes to my mind was chassis 3943. I bought this car along with four other significant cars for Tom Price in California. I remember the price of the five cars was $300,000. The next car I attempted to buy was the Violatti car chassis 3651. This car, in my opinion, was a bad car having killed its first owner. However, being one car in a collection of seventy-odd cars was possibly a deal. We failed to buy the collection. Years time later the car fetched $39 million at auction. A third car I did manage to buy was 3223, the first GTO, the price then was $10.6 million in 2004.

Summary

I am pretty sure that the twenty Ferrari 250 GTO owners had a blast and spent an incredible weekend in Tuscany, hosted by Villa Cora in Florence.

I don`t want to count how many millions of dollars rumbled the hills of the Chianti region to the Mugello circuit and then touring afterwards to parade at the Fiorano track before turning home to the Maranello plant.

A LaFerrari 70th anniversary and a whole baggage train of Ferrari 250 GTOs! Wow

Photo credit: Ferrari Media, Interview write-up: Christopher Renwick, Source: Ferrari Media