Stop what you’re doing, the Sultan of Brunei’s crazy car collection just leaked

If you read about cars in the late 1990s, you probably heard about the most extensive, exclusive, and amazing car collection ever. Before Jay Leno’s Garage or wealthy collectors posted their Chiron, Huayra and Regera hypercars on Instagram, there was the Sultan of Brunei. Through rumors and stories, we heard about thousands of luxury and fully customized models, but rarely did we have the opportunity to see even a few of the cars hidden within.

Until now.

This weekend, a trio of Instagram accounts began posting a series of photos allegedly taken in 2001 in the collection of the Brunei royal family. The pictures are old but the collection is amazing. You need to check these out, especially if you’ve never seen a Ferrari dressed up.

The Brunei collection was the stuff of legend

The exact numbers in the collection have never been known, and at this point they may never be known. We have seen estimates putting the total number at nearly 10,000, with valuations estimated at several billion dollars. The collection was assembled by the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, and his brother Prince Jefri Bolkiah. This collection grew over the course of the 1990s. Custom-made cars from Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, Bugatti, any brand with a touch of prestige. These are not “custom” cars with fancy paintwork either. Think fleets of Ferrari station wagons, Rolls models unique to this collection, and even a Bentley SUV years before Bentley built an SUV for the public.

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As if that wasn’t enough, there are dozens of other mass-produced special models available. When we say “mass production” we mean extremely rare cars like the McLaren F1, the Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959 or the Bugatti EB110. What makes the collection even more amazing is the fact that there are often multiple examples of a single extremely rare car, sometimes in an extremely unusual color. For example, there are two F40s and neither is red.

Photos leaked after more than 20 years

These photos are said to have been taken in 2001. The cars posted on Instagram are supposedly photos that were kept secret for two decades until someone decided to make the car collection public, probably due to some disagreement; The Instagram accounts mention that a Google Drive folder containing these images was deleted. Luckily, it’s available again as of this release.

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The collection stopped growing at the end of the 1990s, which is probably related to when the photos were taken. When the Asian financial crisis broke out in 1997, the resulting cash shortage led to allegations that Prince Jefri had embezzled more than $15 billion from Brunei. As part of a settlement, he began returning property to the state, and posters on Instagram speculate that it was at this point that the photos were taken to prepare the collection for sale.

He probably got tired of circulating the photos, so on Monday the brunei_cars_2001 account posted a Google Drive link to the entire set. It’s a huge folder, but the images are all very well cataloged, which makes things a little easier. Just don’t be surprised if you don’t know many model names, because as we said above, many of these cars simply don’t exist anywhere else in the world. Not even the Ralph Lauren collection comes close, and that’s saying something.