A Ferrari that begs to be driven

Here’s the wonderful news:

A rare 1960s Ferrari convertible sold for a record $27.5 million in a weekend car auction.

The 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4*S NART Spyder’s price was the most paid at auction for the Italian carmaker anywhere in the world and the most for any car bought at a U.S. public sale.

A 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4*S NART Spyder. One of only 10 made, was estimated at $14 million to $17 million in a two-day sale held by RM Auctions in Monterey, California, on Aug. 16-17. The car sold for $27.5 million with fees, the most paid at auction for the Italian carmaker anywhere in the world and the most for any car bought at a U.S. public auction.

“The NART Spyder is a very special car,” the U.K.-based dealer John Collins, one of the underbidders at the RM Auctions event, said in a telephone interview. “They’re so rare. They’re among the most beautiful of all Ferraris. Some of the biggest collectors in the world own one, and Steve McQueen tried to buy this one after he crashed his,” said Collins, of the Talacrest dealership.

Wonder why Steve McQueen wanted another one. Actually, I don’t wonder. He wanted to drive it. But you can’t drive a 27 million dollar car. You put it in a vault. It’s like bronzing Sophia Loren rather than bedding her. A total waste.

The story is presented as some kind of triumph. It just isn’t. I’m not normally in the camp of the 99-percenter hysterics, but this is one time when I am.

Such cars should be experienced, not entombed in sterile museum exhibits by the rich acquisitive old men who can afford to buy them and display them like trophy wives they’re impotent to satisfy physically.

This is not a sudden new subject for me. I remember that the fabled Concours d’Elegance, where all the world’s greatest cars are judged and (sometimes) sold, some years back required that the entered cars be driven in a quasi-race to prove that they were still cars. I remember learning two decades ago that an incredibly high percentage of the original 200 427 Cobras were still intact, having found their way into the hands of owners who knew how to drive such recklessly fast and relatively poor handling monsters without wrecking them. (Based on today’s news, no longer true, I’m sure.) And I remember attending a Bugatti — Hispano Suiza meet some quarter century ago in which the Hispanos were worshipped as works of art while the Bugattis were engaged in a flat-out race, dinged and sliding and determined to win. Yes, the Hispanos were some of the loveliest things I’d ever seen. But the Bugattis smelled like hot Castrol R. Which, to this day, is a smell that intoxicates me more than any other, including even you know. It’s that magical.

[Go ahead. Test it for yourself. Buy a can of Castrol R, which is made from castor beans. No petroleum involved. Heat it up on the stove. Drink it in through your olfactory organs. Then tell me you wouldn’t follow that smell to the last open highway, even if the other was beckoning from the bed.]

I’m not resentful of the rich. I’m tired of the idea that mere money is a complete substitute for passion, skill, learning, esthetic appreciation, and the resolve of the committed to be close to, even intimate with, the entities they love.

It’s a disaster. Not a small one. It’s a diminution of humanity. A Ferrari is not Michelangelo’s David or da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Those are things you can look at. A Ferrari is something you have to feel, hear, steer, shift, smell, and regard the rest of the world from inside on a desperately winding road. You know, like living life.

Something not meant to be bought or sold like stocks.

But maybe that’s just me.