How to Buy Classic Cars

Jay Leno almost passed on his now-famous McLaren F1 twice, calling the roughly $800,000 asking price ‘crazy’ before coming back two weeks later and buying it anyway. That car is worth over $20 million today, and Leno has turned down offers to sell it — proof, he says, that buying a classic because you love it beats buying one purely as an investment. It’s advice that applies whether you’re shopping for a hypercar or a muscle car.

Jay Leno nearly didn’t buy his McLaren F1, a 627-horsepower hypercar that held the title of world’s fastest production car for more than a decade. It turned out to be a sterling investment. “I was the second owner. It was for sale at McLaren, and it was close to a million dollars new. They were asking $800,000, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s crazy. It should be worth a lot less than that.’ But I came back two weeks later, and I bought it.â€

1979 Pontiac Firebird trans am by cricket ground in UK, 2000. (Photo by National Motor Museum/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

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Jay Leno tells a story about almost walking away from what would become one of the most valuable cars in his collection — twice. He thought the asking price was crazy, said no, and went home. Two weeks later he came back and bought it anyway, a decision that turned an already expensive purchase into a fortune few could have predicted at the time. The car in question wasn’t a garage-queen investment piece either; Leno still drives it today, decades after the deal nearly didn’t happen. So what actually changed his mind after he’d already walked away?

Talked Himself Out of It, Then Back In

Leno recalls McLaren asking close to $800,000 for the F1 — about what it had cost new — and his first reaction was that the number was “crazy” for a car that should have depreciated. He left without buying it, but came back two weeks later and completed the purchase anyway, becoming just the second owner of the car after Ben Pon Jr.

Buy It Because You Love It, Not Because It’ll Pay Off

That McLaren F1 is now valued well over $20 million, and Leno has reportedly turned down offers in that range to keep it — a decision he ties directly to how he chose the car in the first place. His stated philosophy is straightforward: buy classic and collector cars because you love the engineering and the experience of owning them, not as a financial play, since chasing investment returns tends to backfire while loving a car means you keep it regardless of what the market does. He also treats the F1 as a driver rather than a static display piece, regularly taking a multimillion-dollar hypercar out on the road instead of locking it away — advice that applies just as well to buying a $30,000 muscle car as it does a supercar.

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