Black 930s just look meaner than any other color. In the
late 1980s, black was the new cool, but Lauren knew this long
before. “I feel that cars in black are very weighty, they have a
beauty and a shape and a sexiness to them,” he explains.
Without aiming to become a deliberate car collector, the
daily drivers in which Lauren shuffled himself around Manhattan were the exotics of the future, the inspiration for today’s
Murcielagos, Diablos and Enzos. So, like the hundreds of guys
who owned Ferraris as just plain driving cars in the mid-1980s,
Lauren liked his own cars because they were fun to drive and
looked cool. That’s it. Lauren bought his Alfa Romeo 8C 2900,
Mercedes SSK, Porsche 550 and Ferrari front-engine racers because he thought they were beautiful. He purchased street cars
such as a 1955 Mercedes SL gullwing, a 1988 Porsche 959 and
three McLaren F1 supercars powered by BMW’s race-derived
6.0-liter V12s. He was a collector long before it became trendy
for rich guys to buy their way into the exotic car market as a
social hobby and an investment.
“I never cared about being a collector. It was not my goal,”
Lauren claims. “Cars were always something that I loved. It
was also about the famous owners and the men who built the
cars. I was fascinated reading about what Enzo Ferrari was like,
what Ettore Bugatti was about, and getting a sense of why they
built these cars and what their lives were like. It’s the lifestyle,
the romance, all those things together.”
Lauren’s people support the image that he collected some
really nifty machines because of his elevated taste, using words
like “pedigree,” “classic” and “timeless” to describe everything
the man owns.
“Cars have always been a source of design inspiration for
me. The cars I collect have a message of timeless beauty,” he
says. However, he also has unrestored Jeeps and pickups that
he thinks are cool because they’re in original condition, the
kind that make you want to put one boot up on the dashboard
while you’re driving, envisioning 200 more miles of ranch road
to cover before you get to feed to the cattle.
In addition to homes in New York and Jamaica, sixtyeight-year-old Lauren has a ranch in Colorado, and he gets
around not just in his old pickups or Wagoneer, but in a ’57
Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, in turquoise that’s been faded by
the sun and weather, and is the equivalent of wearing a 1975
polyester leisure suit to the Oak Room today. If you can pull
it off, that’s as cool as David Arquette wearing homeless-guy
plaids on “The Tonight Show.”
“I got hooked on European cars, though I love army Jeeps
22 CarGuyMagazine.com