its owner had forgotten where he had

Anyone who will constantly have happened to him once he has gone to look for his car and asked: Colega, where is my car? It can happen to anyone, and my personal trick (Although there are others) is to take a picture of the square and parking floor before moving away from the car. I have the mobile full of such photos.

However, in the 70s of the last century, mobiles did not exist, so it was more normal Forget where you had parked your car. This is what happened to Ion Tiriac, a Romanian athlete who participated as an ice hockey player at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games, but who later became a laureate professional tennis player winning a Roland Garros and finalist in several editions of the Davis Cup.

A passionate about luxury cars, but with little memory

In the same way as the millionaires They tend to buy superyatesthe great athletes They opt by the supercar. Ion TIRIAC is no exception. His collection has approximately 400 cars, all of them exposed in a museum near Bucharest, which makes Tiriac one of the most important vehicle collectors In Europe.

In a recent one interviewthe millionaire collector told the story of how he forgot that he had bought a Ferrari F40 And he had left him parked in a Munich garage for a decade.

ION TIRIAC, whose estimated fortune exceeds 2.2 billion dollars, according to Forbeshe was a professional athlete In full cold war. At that time, Soviet block athletes had many TRAVEL PROBLEMSso he opted for move to Montecarlo To solve it. At present it still resides in the small principality.

After putting an end to his career as a professional tennis player, he began teaching the most grenade of the Monegasca society and to train other professional tennis players. There began their First contacts with luxury cars and with the collection classics.

Ferrari F40

However, as the millionaire counts in the interview, for those years he worked at all hours without rest. “I had no time for anything.” That tireless work allowed him to buy the first of his eight Ferraris. Later, I know He bought a Testarrossa. At the same time, the athlete recalled that he had tried to acquire the Ferrari F40 of the then husband of Carolina de Monaco, Stéfano Casiraghi, but finally did not reach an agreement, so he achieved Ferrari F40 by another way.

According to Tiriac, that car It cost him $ 700,000considering that new cost about $ 200,000. Tiriac’s problem is that he was passionate about cars, but he still didn’t have a place in which to keep Its incipient collection of supercar. That lack of space caused him to leave his Ferrari F40 parked in a garage in Munich (Germany).

Ten years later, the millionaire received a call from Mr. Becker, the owner of the garage where he had parked his Ferrari F40. The German recalled Tiriac that his Deportivo was still parked in his parking lot. “I had forgotten my Ferrari for a decade,” the retired tennis player acknowledged.

Realizing that he had forgotten his Ferrari for ten years, Tiriac decided Sell ​​it immediately For two reasons. The first, because it still did not have an adequate place to save it, and second because the car, after ten years of inactivity, needed to travel back to the Maranello factory so that its engine was disassembled and Restoreda necessary process after so many years without use, even for a Ferrari.

In Xataka | I have got into a 420,000 euros car for the first time in my life. Now I know what the millionaires feel

Image | Wikimedia Commons (Bobby Voicu), Ferrari, Flickr (Robert Stokes)

*An earlier version of this article was published in September 2024