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- Steve Hamilton is an aftermarket car parts mogul who owns a $20 million car collection.
- His collection includes customized hypercars worth millions of dollars like the Bugatti Chiron.
- We explore what it takes to keep a collection like this in prime condition year-round.
Narrator: He owns dozens of cars, some worth millions of dollars. Steve Hamilton, the founder of one of America’s biggest wheel and tire distributors, is the face behind the $20 million Hamilton collection. Unlike most collectors, Steve loves constantly driving his cars, even sharing them at charity events to help raise money for important causes. But keeping a collection like Steve’s in prime condition is no easy task. We learned from Steve what it takes to maintain a $20 million car collection and got the details on his rarest and most expensive vehicles.
Steve Hamilton: So, I started my business back in 2003, SD Wheel. Since I’m in the automotive sector, of course, I love cars. I live and breathe them. So 2018, 15 years in the business, I finally decided that it was time to get my first supercar. Fast-forward to today, I’ve got just under 30 cars. I have nine awesome cars on order, most of them which are hypercars, and the collection is worth just around $20 million.
I don’t buy these cars as a financial investment, I actually buy them as just an investment to enrich people’s lives. I love sharing my vehicles with anybody and everybody that wants to sit in them. I let more people drive them than you would ever believe, but fortunately, I have had the privilege of the entire collection gaining over $1 million in value because this market’s a little crazy. And I’m not sure that I want it to correct itself. I kind of like where it’s at right now.
Initially, I started my collection with classic cars. They became so expensive to maintain that I started transitioning into these super- and hypercars. And then I realized that it’s a hell of a lot more money and more difficult to actually maintain super- and hypercars. They break down just as much, in fact, if not more. So it became so out of hand to manage this that I had to hire my good boy Tommy here. Tommy has a full-time job of managing and maintaining the entire collection, and it keeps him busy 40 hours a week. Filling these with gas, making sure they’re clean, but most importantly, doing tunes, modifications, and also probably the bulk of the time is making sure they get repaired. And even right now we have five vehicles in the shop with major repairs happening.
I probably spend somewhere around $30,000 to $50,000 plus a year just maintaining and handling all of the repairs for these vehicles. When it comes to repairs, what sets apart hyper- and supercars from the rest of the cars available — Chevys, Fords, Dodges, Kias, you know, whatever — is that there are just more expensive parts to break. I see a lot of the same issues. Pretty much anytime you break something that sounds like it’s going to be a relatively modest or cheap repair on a general vehicle, it is going to cost about 10X on any hyper- or supercar. And inevitably, whenever you tune or modify a vehicle, it is just going to wear down the engine faster and you are going to run into more problems.
Narrator: So why would Steve spend so much time and money repairing and modifying his cars when he knows what it’ll cost him in the long run? Apparently, that’s just what happens when you love to drive.
Steve: This is my McLaren Senna. There are only 500 of these produced. This was previously owned by Deadmau5. He spec’d it out exactly this way. Very few people do modifications to million-dollar cars, but I absolutely wanted a better driving experience out of this Senna. The tune has taken a solid year to get right. It has been in and out of the shop, and that has been a very, very painstaking process because these engines seem to be quite finicky. I expect this tune to probably cost me upwards of $20,000 plus, and that excludes a bunch of transportation to and from other shops.
I have five different garages at home in which I store all the vehicles. I can fit 15 cars at my house using some lifts. I have additional space at a local facility called Iron Gate. It’s this huge community of car collectors, and it’s just basically huge man caves that store cars and have little kitchenettes and bedrooms.
What sets me apart from most other collectors is that I am driving these in the winter. I don’t really care if there’s snow on the ground. We took the Bugatti out doing some snowboarding, and we got that thing stuck so many times in the snow, but it’s an all-wheel-drive vehicle, and it was well worth the experience. So snow doesn’t stop me, salt doesn’t stop me, cold weather does not stop me. It does require me to clean them a little bit more, though.
Narrator: But while all collectors appreciate every car they own, especially when there are several worth over a million dollars, there’s always a favorite.
Steve: My personal favorite vehicle of the entire fleet is the Bugatti Chiron. It is all-wheel drive, so I can drive it all year long easily. It is the most comfortable. It is the most timeless, with a very comfortable, classic, awesome interior. It is the most powerful car, 1,500 horsepower with 16 cylinders. And it just has a street presence that, I get a different reaction from the Chiron than I do any other vehicle. People definitely look in awe of pretty much any one of the vehicles in the fleet, but when they see the Bugatti, it’s just a jaw drop, silent reaction where they’ve typically never seen it before and they just respect and love it. That car’s worth a little bit over $3.2 million, probably a little less because I’ve put so many freaking miles on it.
I think I’m most excited about all the cars that I actually have on order that are going to be arriving within the next year or two. I have the new Pagani replacement for the Huayra coming, I have a Koenigsegg Jesko, a Koenigsegg Gemera, a Ferrari SF90, a Lamborghini Urus, a Cadillac Escalade, a Bugatti Chiron SS, Tesla Roadster, Tesla Cybertruck. I’m probably forgetting one or two more, but super pumped to have these vehicles coming up.
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