- There is a car collection worth over $5 billion
just rotting away in the jungle right now.
Who is this mysterious car collector?
How did he get so rich?
And why is he letting $5 billion worth of cars
just rot away?
Let's get you up to speed on the Sultan of Brunei.
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Owning one exotic super car is expensive as hell.
The sticker price is just the beginning.
Then you have insane maintenance costs,
basic parts like brakes and tires
that cost more than a brand new Beamer.
And not to mention all the caviar
that you have to shove in your face
just to fit in with the other super car owners.
But you can imagine how insanely expensive
it would be to buy and maintain 108 Bentley Continentals,
70 Ferrari 456 GTs, 28 Aston Martin Virages.
You gotta be dummy rich.
You gotta be a sultan.
Like the dad from Aladdin.
This is Hassanal Bolkiah
and he's the 29th sultan of the nation of Brunei.
If you've never heard of Brunei, that's fine.
Brunei is a tiny Southeast Asian country,
less than half the size of Connecticut.
But what Brunei lacks in size,
it makes up for in oiliness.
The country has access to some of the most productive oil
and natural gas reserves in the world.
And because they're such a tiny country,
a lot of that wealth is funneled
directly into the Royal family and the sultan himself.
Brunei gained independence from great Britain in 1984.
And with the shift in power came the rights
to the country's gas reserves.
So in just three years,
following Brunei's independence,
the sultan became the world's richest man
with a cool $40 billion bag.
I mean, can you imagine, dude?
Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush,
Hassanal is a horny dude, all right?
He commissioned statues of himself
having sex with goddesses.
And he's got a huge yacht that he named "Tits".
Tits.
But the sultan's younger and considerably more buck brother,
Jeffrey, is even more hornier.
He turned out to be a pretty strong influence
on how his older brother spends his fortune.
Prince Jeffrey, AKA the Playboy Prince,
basically had carte blanche from the sultan
to buy whatever he wanted for the royal palace
and buy whatever he wanted for royal palace he did.
$70 million Renoir painting.
Fricking throw it in the cart.
Yacht, jets, art, lavish events.
Including building a $17 million stadium
and enough cash to hire Michael Jackson
to celebrate the sultan's 50th birthday.
Hell yeah, that's a good brother.
He also had a gold plated hot tub, because those are sick.
But none of that compares to the insane amount of cash
that Jeffrey and Hassanal dropped on cars.
Just to let you know the sheer amount of cars they bought
sales of Rolls Royce to the brothers
accounted for half of all Rolls Royces sold in the 90s.
Half!
To put that into context,
that's roughly how much of an Arnold Palmer
that's made up by lemonade, huh?
And it's not just classic luxury cars
like Rolls Royces and Bentleys,
Jeffrey also bought extremely rare cars in bulk.
Mercedes CLK GTR,
one of the sickest lamal style production cars ever built.
It's one of my favorite cars.
It's got a 6.9 liter V12, makes 600 horsepower.
They only made 26 of them total.
20 in the hard top version, six drop tops.
And the sultan has one of each.
McLaren made five special edition F1 LMs.
The Saltan has three of those.
He has owns five Bugatti EV110s.
Who needs five of those?
Prince Jeffrey needs five of those.
And one of them is painted like this.
Now before long,
the Brunei boys owned almost 200 Ferraris,
400 Bentleys, and over 200 BMWs.
Their favorite car company though,
gotta be Rolls Royce.
They owned over 600 of them.
I'm no mathematician, right?
But if you drove one Rolls Royce per day,
without repeating,
it would take you over 11 years before you repeat a car.
I think.
What's even more impressive than my math skills
are the custom one-off cars
that the brothers have made just for them.
Sure, a fleet of luxury cars is cool,
but for the guys who have doubles and triples of everything,
triples are better.
What's the most impressive car that you can buy?
Why, it's the one that doesn't exist, of course.
At this point, I should mention that by the early 90s
another family member,
just as crazy as the others,
is now getting into cars.
And he was all about ordering them crazy customs.
I'm talking about Prince Abdul Hakeem.
More on him in a bit.
Anyway, the sultan and his family
have some of the most insane one-off custom cars
to ever exist.
They get whatever they want.
You ever heard of a Bentley Dominator?
It's a Bentley station wagon
that kind of looks like a predecessor to a Bentayga
but it's a bit squatter.
Since it was a secret project,
not much is known other than he made six of them
at a cost of $4.6 million each.
But even if you had the cash,
you couldn't get your dirty little fingers on one of these
because all six Dominators were made specifically
for the sultan and his family.
Sorry, Mark Davis.
Bentleys known for having tons of different things
that you can customize on their cars.
Like type of wood,
leather pattern, and color,
a million different paint options.
But what about stubborn car companies
that don't like to customize?
Someone like Ferrari.
Never in a million years would bow down to some rich guy.
So apparently Ferrari bowed down to the rich guy.
The story goes that Prince Hakeem started getting sick
of ordering regular Ferrari's, the poor guy.
He wanted to help design one on his own.
Just to let you know the scale of this kids spoiled-ness,
all right, when he turned 18,
he got a billion dollars in cash as a present.
When he started getting interested in American football,
his family paid to fly out Joe Montana and Herschel Walker
to coach them.
When they ran a football scrimmage,
nobody wanted to tackle him.
So he scored a touchdown every time
he was passed the ball.
It's like Mr. Burns.
Oh, you want a warehouse full of Ferrari Enzos?
No problem.
You want to Bentley modified so it looks like a car
a cartoon villain would drive?
Sure, dude, here you go.
That football story is so funny to me.
Like, did he have fun?
That seems embarrassing.
Anyway, in the 90s,
when Pince Hakeem really wanted a semi-automatic
transmission in his Ferrari,
everyone bent over backwards to make it possible.
There's just one problem.
That kind of technology wasn't in production cars yet.
Semiauto transmissions can be found in race cars
and rally cars,
but they were just too jerky to put in a road car
that was supposed to ride smoother than a race car.
So what did the Royal family do?
They call it up Pininfarina
who had already designed 50 models for them.
Like this Ferrari F50 Bolide.
Which, believe that, had the same internals as an F50
but a body kit and a wing.
They also modified nine of 11 Ferrari F40s
that the family owns.
Jesus.
Pininfarina put their prototype manager on the job.
A dude named Paolo Gorilla who worked on the Ferrari Methos,
a prototype only supercar
that is honestly one of the sickest concept cars ever.
It never went to market.
In fact, Ferrari specifically made it clear
that they would never sell the Methos.
But somehow the sultan got his grubby little fingers
on two of them.
Tasked with making a custom super car with technology
that didn't exist yet
for a demanding uncompromising client,
Palo got to work and contacted a company called Prodrive,
you may have heard of them.
They'd been making semi-automatic transmissions
for their WRC cars for a while now.
And they wanted to bring the technology
to the consumer market.
The Ferrari project seemed like the perfect first step.
I don't think they're Italian.
Palo's stallion of choice, boom,
Ferrari Testarossa, great looking car.
He used it to develop the Methos years earlier.
And it's flat 12 was a spicy little spanini
and a great building block to work off of.
This semiauto transmission would be a bit more work
than he expected though.
Prodrive's system was super complex.
It used both hydraulic and pneumatic arrangements
to activate the clutch and actually switch gears.
Pininfarina assigned an engineer just to figure out
how it would mate to Ferrari's stock
six speed manual transmission.
Computer systems were developed to make shift times
as short as possible, and shifts less jerky.
And in the end, they were able to make it happen.
Gears could seamlessly shift via buttons
on the steering wheel,
allowing the driver to harness every bit
of those 420 hrsprs provided by the flat 12.
Pininfarina even added some special touches to the car
with a Sony tape player and a little plaque on the inside
that read "FX".
I assume because they were huge "It's Always Sunny" fans.
Ferrari FX was an engineering success.
Three of them were made,
delivered to Prince HakeeM
and he was a delighted boy.
He's such a delighted boy.
I want three, daddy.
Then you will have a three, my son.
I'm going to go kill this dog now daddy.
Do it, son.
You know this kid hurt animals.
He liked 'em so much that he ordered three more
based off the newer Testarossa,
the F12M,
which had 20 more hours power and a lighter chassis.
You know what they say, triples are best,
but sixes are better.
Five of the FXs are in Brunei.
And one got snatched up by McLaren,
which is probably a good thing
because what you're about to find out
about this stash of Supercars is heartbreaking.
$5 billion worth of cars is a lot of cars.
If you live in LA,
having more than one car is a huge pain in the ass
trying to find a place to park it.
But what about in a country half the size of Connecticut?
Luckily, like everything else, money can solve that issue.
The sultan had multiple massive concrete garages built
to house his thousands and thousands of cars.
A lot of the collection is kept secret.
I mean, the only reason that we know about the Ferrari FX
is because of a line in Ferrari's accounting records
years later.
But something happened in the late 90s
that forced the royal family
to open up their garage doors a bit.
In 1997, Southeast Asia went through a financial crisis
and oil prices plummeted.
Now as you can guess,
this was bad news for the economy of Brunei
who made most of their capital from oil.
That didn't stop Prince Hakeem and Jeffrey from spending
like was the end of the world.
Jeffrey allegedly kept 40 sex workers on call at all times
and spent $7 million on a jewel encrusted watch.
And that's totally worth every penny
because the face of the watch had an animated picture
of people doing sex.
Sick.
By the time that 2002 rolled around,
the sultan was hurting
and he needed to liquefy some of his assets.
So he invited a Ferrari broker from California,
that's where I live, by the name of Michael Sheehan,
not that Michael Sheehan,
to come check out some of the cars that the sultan
was looking to part with.
The offer?
13 custom Ferrari's and McLaren F1 for sale
at a staggeringly low price.
Like a pack of day old donuts.
Mike hopped on a plane to Brunei
and what he saw there would make Jay Leno rollover
in his denims.
At first, it wasn't bad, just excessive.
Michael was led from garage to garage
each with its own theme.
One building was filled with Porsche's from 911s
the super rare 959s.
Another building was filled with just black
Mercedes S500 sedans.
Now this went on for eight different two-story garages,
each filled with about 240 cars.
Now the heartbreaking part is that some of the garages
weren't temperature or humidity controlled,
which means that they turned into greenhouses.
Excess moisture and heat were literally cooking
these super rare cars.
Paint was peeling,
leather and carpet covered in mold.
Now I know this pales in comparison to the actual atrocities
happening in the world.
But man, these cars rotting is also a bummer.
More than one thing can be a bummer.
Like what's the point in having all these ultra rare cars,
if you never drive them and you just let them disintegrate
in the corner of a garage in the jungle?
And Michael's account was from 2002,
that's like 20 years ago.
It'd be very safe to say that a good amount of these cars
are beyond repair.
Some of them have zero miles on the odometer.
They never got driven.
They never did what they were supposed to do.
That means they're in hell.
That means cars like the Mercedes CLK GTR,
the Lamborghini Urraco,
Jaguar XJ220, Koenigsegg CCXR,
and a BMW Nazca M12 prototype,
one of only three ever made,
are probably never going to see the road
and that's sad to me.
I know that this isn't a typical episode of this show
where we celebrate the accomplishments of a racer,
or get pumped at how awesome a car is.
But if nothing else,
I think that we can all agree that this kind of greed
(beep) sucks.
What's the point of doubles and triples
when no one can drive them?
It's just like my hero, Benjamin Diesel, said
in the movie Fast and Furious with no thes,
"nothing is saddder than locking a beast in a cage."
Most bad-ass thing anyone's ever said.
That guy is tough and strong.
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