Bill Nelson wasn’t looking for an investment, just a thrill. So nine years ago the then 64-year-old retired engineer from Asbury, N.J. went to his local Ford dealer and put down $160,000 to buy the fastest and most expensive production car the company had ever built, the Ford GT.
“I’m a lifelong Ford guy,” he explains. “When I saw that car, I absolutely had to have one.”
Owning America’s first supercar has given Nelson more than his share of adrenalized drives on New Jersey’s back roads. And one day it will potentially deliver an impressive return on his money.
Earlier this year another Ford GT–one bearing an early VIN of 003–brought an astonishing $605,000 at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale Auction. And lesser GTs routinely change hands for more than double their original sticker price. In fact, the GT is the only American production car built this millennium that’s an appreciating classic rather than a fast, expensive used car.
It’s not just 200mph top speeds but also escalating prices that separate true supercars–such as the Ferrari F40, the Porsche Carrera GT and the McLaren F1–from run-of-the-mill exotics, and the Ford GT has earned its membership in this exclusive club.
“Ford checked off all the right boxes,” says Wayne Carini, owner of Connecticut’s F40 Motorsports and the host of Velocity’s Chasing Classic Cars . “It’s an iconic car.”
Buyers like Nelson aren’t so much purchasing 3,400 pounds of superplastic aluminum as they are the story behind it. The GT is the successor to one of the greatest racing cars of all time, the Le Mans-winning GT40s of the late 1960s. The GT40 project was launched by Henry Ford II, who felt betrayed after Enzo Ferrari backed out of a deal to sell him his company. Beating the Ferraris at their own game, the GT40s competed during the sport’s Golden Age, when race-winning cars could actually be driven on the street. But there were only 31 street-legal GT40s back then, and they’ve since become all-but-unobtainable rarities, with multimillion-dollar price tags.
This story appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Forbes.