The Hagerty Power List charts the impact of celebrity ownership on classic car prices, and chart success is number one when it comes to adding value.
Fans have paid thousands of times over the odds to own cars owned by their musical heroes, from high-buck supercars to fairly conventional machines with morbid histories. But – and this is where we adopt our best Tony Blackburn voice – who is pick of the pops? Below is our top-ten rundown of the musicians whose cars created records of their own.
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10. Rod Stewart
Rocker Rod’s cars are worth an average of 19 per cent more than those not owned by the gravel-voiced singer. Hagerty’s analysts looked at 14 sales of cars previously owned by Rod the Mod to come up with the figure and discovered that the rock star’s cars have a habit of Sailing in and out of the auctions time and again.
His 1983 Ferrari 400i has sold no less than four times since 1991, his 1977 Lamborghini Countach has been under the hammer twice and his Miuras have sold five times between them. Rod’s biggest hit was arguably the 1972 Miura SV which sold at Bonhams’ Goodwood Revival sale in 2013 for a then-world record price of £919,900.
9. Nick Mason
Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason has one of the most impressive car collections in the world and having him as a previous keeper adds a fifth to the value of a car, according to our Power List statisticians. Taking into account nine previous sales the provenance of past Mason ownership pushes the sales price up 19 per cent on average.
In 2021 his far-from-mint 1991 Porsche 944 Turbo SE sold on the Car & Classic website for £22,500 when the Hagerty guide price for a car in similar condition was just £13,900, and a 1998 Series 1 Lotus Elise drummed up £34,285 at Silverstone Auctions the same year, fetching more than double our price guide value of £16,400. Mason wasn’t so lucky in the past, however, with his 1971 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 (sold in 2000 and 2004) and 1936 Aston Martin two-litre (sold in 1992) both selling for less than market value, pushing him further down the charts than one might expect.
8. Frank Sinatra
The original Rat Packer packs a 51 per cent premium based on the sale of his 1994 Mercedes-Benz E420 which sold in Las Vegas (of course) for £10,639 in 2019 despite being in distinctly average condition. Sinatra loved to swing about town in a host of fancy including a Lamborghini Miura and a rare Dual Ghia, but these haven’t come up for sale for decades.
7. Cher
In seventh place is Cher whose 1966 Ford Mustang fetched £45,108 at the Barrett-Jackson Mandalay Bay auction in 2016. That’s 56 per cent more than one would Believe a Mustang to have made at the time.
6. Elton John
Sir Elton’s cars are the most frequently sold on our list with 17 different sales to consider. That’s not surprising considering the Rocket Man has owned some out of this world cars from Aston Martin, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Bentley. On average, they have fetched 115 per cent over the odds. When it comes to pure profit his 1956 Bentley S1 Continental Fastback is top of Elton’s playlist, having sold for £196,250 in 2001 and achieving an astonishing 341 per cent markup. His 1993 Jaguar XJ220 sold at the same time for £234,750 – a hike of 68 per cent.
5. Sonny Bono
Even from beyond the grave Sonny managed to make the statement “I got you babe”. At the very same Barrett Jackson auction in 2016, his almost identical 1966 Ford Mustang outsold Cher’s pony car. Achieving £58,640 its 123 per cent inflation over an equivalent car was double what his ex-wife’s car managed.
4. Keith Richards
Richards’ cars have racked up sales averaging 205 per cent more than they would have without Rolling Stones’ ownership. A 1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GT that Keith bought new was auctioned at Bonham’s Goodwood Revival sale in 2019 for £442,750, which was more than £150,000 beyond book value at the time, but it’s his 1983 Ferrari 400i and 1965 Bentley S1 Continental Flying Spur that provided the most Satisfaction to sellers, with the Ferrari fetching three times more than a less rock’n’roll example would have done and the Bentley an incredible five times more.
3. Elvis Presley
The King was a complete car nut as anyone who’s ever visited his collection at Gracelands can attest. It’s no wonder that auctions get All Shook Up when one of his cars is up for grabs and the result is an average 229 per cent price hike if Elvis is listed as a previous owner.
Some 13 different sales going back to 1996 were studied by Hagerty boffins including three Cadillacs, two Mercedes-Benzes, two Lincolns and a Rolls-Royce. Of the most recent exchanges it’s an ordinary-by-Elvis-standards 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham which stands out after reaching £66,083 during a Car & Classic online auction, which is 518 per cent higher than if the King had never sat in its driving throne.
2. Tupac Shakur
It gets rather dark as we head into the top two. On 7 September 1996 Tupac was travelling through Las Vegas in a new BMW 750iL, leased by Death Row Records. As he stopped at a red light on East Flamingo Road a Cadillac pulled alongside and the rear seat passenger opened fire. Tupac was hit four times and died six days later. When the car was listed in November 2019 it had been restored, removing all traces of violence. The price was $1.75 million and with a mid-90s Seven Series not exactly being the most collectible of cars that represented a morbid markup of 8,233 per cent.
1. The Notorious B.I.G.
Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls or The Notorious B.I.G. was, in a case of grim irony, in Los Angeles to promote his second album Life After Death when he too was killed in a drive-by shooting. In the early hours of the morning of 9 March 1997, Biggie and his entourage stopped at traffic lights on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and South Fairfax Avenue when a Chevrolet Impala drew up next to them and the driver shot the rapper. He died within the hour at the age of just 24.
20 years later the 1997 GMC Suburban that he was travelling in on that fateful night sold for $1.5 million, an increase of 18,650 per cent compared to a similar Suburban. A family had been using it for years, though the only remaining evidence of the night in question was a bullet hole in one seatbelt.
The Hagerty Valuation Team says
The top of our list is a pretty gruesome place, with the cars in which The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac were shot dead holding the first two places. That said, we’ve just heard that the Tupac car sale has not gone though, so at present that’s an advertised value rather than a sale price. B.I.G’s car also shows a huge margin as it is a very standard model: a GMC Suburban complete with patched-up bullet hole in the safety belt. Advertised in 2017 for $1.5m, that’s a lot more than the $8000 (£6500) Hagerty valued it at. There are some real petrolheads on our list: we tracked 13 cars linked to Elvis, 13 to Elton John, 14 to Rod Stewart and 10 to Jay Kay. Unfortunately, the cars linked to Jay Z were a job-lot of trucks that failed to light the public’s imagination.
See the other categories from The Hagerty Power List 2022
• The Hagerty Power List 2022: Movies
• The Hagerty Power List 2022: Movie stars
• The Hagerty Power List 2022: Royalty
• The Hagerty Power List 2022: Drivers
• The Hagerty Power List 2022: Notable and notorious
• About The Hagerty Power List
