A look inside the car collection of Michael Fux
Michael thinks he has 160 cars, but he’s not sure
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Your support makes all the difference.Some people like to hide their money under the mattress. Michael Fux put his money into mattresses. There must be more princesses around than we thought, because he’s clearly sold rather a lot of them. As a consequence he has been able to indulge in his passion for collecting and – to be fair – driving cars.
He thinks he has around 160 cars but has lost count – it takes three hanger-size garages to accommodate them all, but this is far from a static display. He drives these cars, and enjoys them. He’s come a long way since he arrived in the US from Cuba in 1958. Back then he was an impoverished teenager with no car, although he soon remedied that with a 1949 Dodge coupe, his first ever set of wheels.
Now he often gets chauffeured around in his white Rolls-Royce Phantom.
White is perhaps a fairly straightforward colour for a Fux car. Back in 2013 he was being entertained by Rolls-Royce at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance (as you are) and he saw a purple pansy flower he rather took a fancy to. He asked Rolls-Royce to match the colour for the Phantom Drophead Coupe he had just ordered. Of course they did, all 19 coats of it.
Then he decided what he really needed was a McLaren 12C Spider. Naturally he wanted it to match so Rolls-Royce gave the paint formula to McLaren for a one-off use. This year he revisited that idea when he saw an orchid he rather liked at the Pebble Beach event. Rolls-Royce knew what to do. One fuchsia Rolls-Royce Dawn later, Mr Fux espied a McLaren 720S. Off went the paint formula again.
The colours he clearly likes are, shall we say, arresting – or to put it another way, you’d get arrested for your own safety in some US states, but he’s the customer and he can have what he wants.
We prick up our ears when we hear he’s going to be one of the 106 customers for the McLaren Ultimate Series BP23 hybrid, a £2m hypercar. Planning on beige perhaps? He will only confess that it will indeed be in a ‘special colour’. The imagination boggles. Perhaps McLaren should follow him around and see what flowers he’s been looking at.
He’s a bit of an addict really, something he’s happy to admit to. “At least if I had an addiction to drugs I’d spend a lot less money!”
So is there a new car coming to keep the addiction fed? This is what is coming just this year: three Porsches, a Ferrari 812 Superfast, a Dodge Demon, a Pagani Huayra, a Merc-AMG GT R plus two versions of the GT C Edition 50, not forgetting two Merc-AMG S65s, so he’s got one at his properties in Florida, another one for the properties in California.
It looks like he still has a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Tony Middlehurst and Graham Scott are writers for AutoCar.
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