There's money, and then there's money. With the former, you might be able to put together a nice little garage, with a beautiful daily driver and a limited edition weekend toy and maybe even an expensive project or two. With the latter—we're talking Sultan of Brunei money here—you buy huge chunks of a supercar's entire production run just so you never run out of spares, if you ever drive it at all.
With massive reserves of oil and natural gas at their disposal, members of the Brunei Royal Family are among the richest people in the world, and Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and his brother Jefri spent much of their lives (and billions of dollars) building what's probably the most insane car collection on Earth. At one point it was rumored to number almost 2,500 cars, but a late-nineties financial crisis, poor maintenance, and general neglect have caused it to dwindle and rot since then.
And that's an incredible shame, because these rare pictures posted in a slideshow on YouTube today show just how mind-boggling the collection was in its prime. Highlights include: a Ferrari F50 and Lamborghini Diablo in matching yellow, a Ferrari FX, a McLaren F1 GTR 'Longtail' (and three other regular-tailed F1s) the famous Ferrari 456 GT Venice station wagon, a brigade of yellow ducktail Porsche 993s, at least seven Jaguar XJ220s, five Porsche 959s, a room full of Mercedes SLs, one very out-of-place beige Lexus ES, and the list goes on and on.
That abbreviated description doesn't even account for the dozens of special one-offs and unique projects the Sultan and his brother used to order from coachbuilders and manufacturers when money was literally no object. You'd probably need a week to pour through everything seen the background of these pictures and puzzle out exactly what's in there. Check it out yourself: