£115m Picasso: the car alternatives

This week, the world of art has seen a couple of world records broken, the biggest headlines going to Pablo Picasso. His painting ‘Les femmes d'Alger' has just sold for a princely £115 million, which got us lot pondering.

Not what Picasso was thinking as he made a now rather famous set of brushstrokes, nor what the abstract shapes and colours of the piece really mean. No, what we're wondering is: exactly how much four-wheeled fun you could have for the same nine-figure sum of money?

Here's what £115m (or $180m in American monies) buys you in the world of cars...

Yup. Two seasons, if you're willing to sit right at the back of the pack. But with the season budget of Williams, Force India, Toro Rosso and Sauber estimated at £100million each in recent years, you could run a mid-table F1 team (or better than that, in the case of Williams) for one of the more high-profile, stained-in-the-memory years of your life. Warning: price does not include arbitrary fines, or driver 'entertainment' bills.

Or you could have a picture on one wall of your house. Tough call.

We've used our very best guesstimation here, but with 864 Astons shifted on the company's home turf in 2014, and the average cost of each car it offers £131,500, you could easily have bought the whole lot. With plenty of room for options box ticking.

We're no art critics, but an exquisitely specced DB9 or a load of random paint splodged on a rectangular piece of canvas: which is prettier?

That's Bloodhound, the 1,000mph car (hopefully). Not just the car itself, though. Oh no. The £41million that the whole eight-year project is expected to cost covers research and development, the building and running of the car and the ‘global education programme' that's surrounding it.

So not only would Picasso money get you three 1,000mph cars and the most ludicrously dangerous (albeit exciting) drag race in all of time, but a whole caboodle of activity around it.

And if your jaw still hasn't hit the carpet with a sufficient smack, remember that Bloodhound's fuel pump - one of its less intricate parts, it may be safe to assume - is a 542bhp supercharged V8 engine. It all suddenly seems like quite a steal, no?

 
Or more than a quarter of the entire Veyron population, in other words. We’d like to say you could have one of each Big Bug special edition, but it feels like there have been more than 77 of those…
 
Facetiousness aside, this is perhaps the stat that shows up how blooming expensive that painting is most starkly. Does a Picasso original have a minimum of 1,001bhp? Or a 268mph top speed? Or four turbos? Or one of the more vulgar set of development targets of the car world?
 
It doesn’t, and £115million is more than enough cash to set up the most bizarre one-make series in the history of motorsport, with contact definitely allowed…

That's 4,091 Citroen C4 Grand Picasso Exclusive+ BlueHDi 150 EAT6 autos, we must add, the range-topping seven-seat diesel auto version of the most recent car to bear the name of the man whose painting sold for a record sum this week.

If your airport taxi fleet doesn't need anywhere near that much class, then don't forget the humble old Xsara Picasso that first bore old Pablo's name, to the chagrin of some of his family.

Even a well-cared-for 2001 car with a below-average 84,000 miles to its name will only set you back £795. You'll be able to get 144,654 of those for your £115million, though good luck a) finding somewhere big enough to store them, and b) finding that many mini MPVs mollycoddled enough to still be worth owning.

And not just any old trackdays, either. To befit arguably the best track car on Earth, we've also picked Spa, arguably our planet's greatest race circuit. And realising what a toll its high speeds and steep gradients will take on the car, we've factored in appropriately regular tyre and brake replacements.

We know many of the art world's finest works can be almost endlessly pondered, hidden meanings leaping out of them upon every viewing. But how much time could you really spend looking at one mere picture before exhausting all possible context out of it?

Less than the 14-and-a-half years £115million would give you to nail Eau Rouge flat in a GT3 RS, we're certain of that...

...and 1,880,103,222 miles of motoring, at current fuel prices, and assuming you achieve the Golf's lofty official mpg figure. If you're not Rachel Riley, that assortment of digits and commas translates as nearly two billion miles. If you're still struggling to compute the number, that's a LONG WAY.

Though unlike all those laps of Spa in a Porsche, we think we'd rather mentally deconstruct a picture than extract over 88mpg from a 1.6 diesel Golf for the rest of time.