My trip to the Fox Classic Car Collection

[Frenche]

Somedays I really like my job, on Friday the engineering boss decided that we engineers all deserved a bit of a break and a thankyou for putting in some long hours recently (16 hour days for some of us) so treated us to a day of go-karting followed by a visit to one of our customers classic car collection, of course the customer just happens to be Lindsay Fox and he seems to have a pretty nice collection .

I tried to take as many pics as I could (only had my phone with me so not the best quality) but spent most of the time gawking like a school kid over the cars, nothing like being right up close and personal with some great iconic cars (Porsche 959, Ferrari F40, Ferrari F50, Ferrari 288 GTO, Jag XJR-15 and XJ-220, etc, etc).

For me the highlights were the F40, 288, XJ220, XKR15 and that Merc 190E, (always loved sport sedans from the late 80's early 90's like the 190E, M3, Sierra Cosworth, Alfa 75, etc, etc) plus the "moden" rolls that is one of only 2 made (it's a design study or something) but it does have the full Bently turbo running gear in it which could be fun to drive. You can see the supervisor for the team I work for staring into the XJ220 engine compartment trying to figure out just how to cram that engine into the front of his Datto 1600. The little A-class merc may seem a bit weird to have in the collection, but it is one of only 3 in the world that has twin AMG tuned engines in it. Apparently it is rather fast and has slayed quite a few cars at the traffic light grand prix. I missed pics of a lot of cars, too busy talking sh1t and perving on them but had a great time.

Anyway here are the pics, hope at least somebody enjoys them.

 

[storm_detonation]

There are some awesome cars there! I've always loved the XJ220.

 

[mookers]

Good stuff!

Nice work perks. I wish we had stuff like that.

 

[BFun]

I want that E-type...

 

[staticc]

That would have been a very good day.

My 2 favourite cars in the world there, XJ220 and the F40.

 

[Frenche]

Which one Ben? there were 3 there, along with an aluminium bodied XK 120 (one of only 242 ever made) and a nice drophead Mk V, Lindsay definitely has good taste when it comes to cars.

The funniest part of the visit was watching 20 or so of us engineers, standing in a room surrounded by several million dollars of rare and historic vehicles, all trying to work out why the door into the room was designed the way it was .

It turns out that the actual building (constructed in the 1800's) was used as a mint and then a customs house for the nearby harbour and as a result, had a strong room and a safe. To get the building to comply with current building codes it needed a sprinkler system so some guy showed up with a fancy hole boring/drilling rig and said it would take about 3 hours to bore straight through the wall. 8 hours later he was finally done and when they took to core out of the hole, they found why it was so tough to cut through. The walls are well over 1ft thick and used railway tracks as reinforcing, 4 layers of them (2 running horizontal with vertical ones sandwiching them) . If ever a nuclear bomb goes off in Melbourne I want to be in that room lol

 

[BFun]

Oh, I'm not fussed, I can take all three

Sheesh, sounds like a little overkill for the room. At least, the cars will be safe!

 

[Frenche]

haha so could I, but being 6'4" I would only fit on the V12 convertible one. Only the string room (about the size of a double garage) has the really thick walls, well as far as they know, they didn't really want to drill holes in the others to find out.

We had a good chuckle when leaving as we noticed the forklift the use to lift the cars to the upper story since the internal lift isn't big enough, it looks like it cost $50 from the trading post and has the job of lifting one of a kind multi million dollar cars.

 

[Interloper]

awesome thanks for sharing, what a great collection