Plenty of people will be happy to splash a few hundred pounds on a personalised number plate for their classic, but if you fancy something as exclusive as F1, then you’ll have to splash rather more cash than that.
Bought by Afzal Kahn for £440,000 in 2008 (which at the time was a record price in the UK for a registration number at auction), the F1 registration was recently listed on www.Plates4Less.co.uk at £12,250,270.83.
Once compulsory government charges have been added to that asking price, it will set you back a cool £14,700,405, or as we like to think of it, the equivalent of 3267 Austin Allegros in first class condition.
That may be a little beyond the means of us at CW, but the general public’s appetite for personalised registrations seems as strong as ever with over £111 million being spent on them last year alone.
At the DVLA’s most recent sale, the total raised was over £5.2 million from 4900 registered bidders.
Highest price on the day was 1 SVR – it fetched £45,000 at the gavel, though the cost including fees to the Birmingham-based businessman who waggled his finger most vigorously was £58,400.
That was still some way short of the top price paid so far at auction, the £518,000 paid for 25 O in 2014 and a number believed to now be on a Ferrari 250SWB worth around £10million.
We have to admire the buyer of S1 in 2008, though. This was claimed to be Scotland’s first ever registration number, and the anonymous buyer who paid £404,000 for it said he was going to put it on an old Skoda.
Rather puts the old joke about doubling a Skoda’s value by filling up the tank with petrol into the shade, doesn’t it?
