It can be hard to quantify the extra value a celebrity connection gives to a classic car. At the top end, it?s plenty?the Porsche 911 that Steve McQueen drove during the opening sequence of the movie Le Mans sold for nearly $1.4 million back in 2011, a hefty supplement even given the increasingly daft prices attached to early air-cooled 911s.
Now we know that Tom Selleck has a smaller but still significant effect, with one of the Ferrari 308GTS Quattrovalvole cars used for the filming of Magnum, P.I., having sold for $181,500 at auction last week. That?s about double what you could expect to pay for a similar 308 with less stardust, proof of the still unarguable cool of Selleck?s mustachioed private eye.
For those not old enough to have experienced its lurid appeal, or who have worked hard to wipe their memories, Magnum, P.I., was a hugely popular 1980s TV show set in Hawaii, with Selleck playing the eponymous crime-solving hero, Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV. He lived on an absentee millionaire?s private estate and, for reasons that were never quite explained or certainly not quite remembered, got to drive said millionaire?s Ferrari 308 between assignments, assignations, and even occasional low-budget car chases. It also featured heavily in the opening credits, which we urge you to watch. Right now.
According to auctioneer Bonhams, there were actually several of these cars, with Magnum progressing from an early carbureted 308GTS to a GTSi and then finally moving to the QV in...