With two weeks to go in an online auction of the world’s largest Peter Brock car collection, fans of the Australian racing legend have bid more than $4 million for race and rally cars supposedly owned or driven by the King of the Mountain.
Since he died in a rally 12 years ago, the price of any car with any connection to Brock is bringing in more than $100,000. His 1982-83 Bathurst-winning HDT VH Commodore SS is expected to sell for more than $2 million when the Lloyds auction ends on Saturday week. The latest bid sits at $1.6m.
His 1989 Mobil 1 Racing Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 already has attracted a bid of $500,000, but half a million dollars is cheap for a Ford raced by the Holden-mad Brock at Bathurst.
However, there are serious questions about the provenance of the Ford Sierra.
Brock’s former Sierra co-driver, Andrew Miedecke, said: “I know for absolute sure it was not a Brock race car. It is concerning that the auction and promotional material (lead people to infer) the car is a Brock Mobil race car.”
Mr Miedecke, a Port Macquarie Ford dealer, owns one of the only two Brock Sierras in existence. British collector Rupert Kent bought the other in 2016.
Mr Miedecke believes the car in the auction is probably one he built from parts he had lying around, painted in Mobil colours and displayed at his Ford dealership. “It had never started or even been to a track until after I sold it. It was never raced by the Brock team or Brock himself,” he said.
A former two-time world motorcycle champion, the late Barry Sheene, crashed the third Mobil Sierra in testing in 1989. It was rebuilt and then crushed to avoid paying import duty in 1990.
With classic car prices matching those of old masters, counterfeiting is a huge issue. Last year, Spanish police smashed a fake Ferrari scam, while in Thailand building fakes for northern hemisphere auctions is a major industry. In Australia police have busted make-believe muscle-car rings.
“The video on the auction website very strongly infers that the car in the auction was a Brock car,” Mr Miedecke says.
The Australian contacted Lloyds for comment but the company did not reply.
“Lloyds Auctions sells these cars under standard auction conditions that offers no warranties or cooling-off period,” a disclaimer on the website reads.
But Mr Miedecke says: “There is a very strong moral issue here, if not a legal one.”
