Muhammad Ali’s Rolls-Royce Could Be Even More Tempting Than His Alfa Spider

A little over a month ago, we brought you an auction listing for a 1976 Alfa Romeo Spider that once belonged to the late, great Muhammad Ali coming up for sale later this month. But that won’t be the only one of his cars coming up for sale.

In fact it won’t even be the only silver ’70s convertible to have belonged to the champ to be auctioned off this fall.

Bonhams has similarly announced the consignment of Ali’s 1970 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow cabriolet as the headline lot for its upcoming Zoute sale in Belgium next month. And we’d wager that it floats more like a butterfly than it stings like a bee.

The spiritual predecessor of today’s Dawn (and the Phantom Drophead Coupe before it), the Silver Shadow was one of Rolls-Royce’s longest-running models. The British marque produced over 30,000 of them between 1965 and 1980 – most of them saloons, but also some coupes and convertibles. The droptop was produced from 1971 until 1996 as the Corniche, giving the model an unfathomably long lifespan of over 30 years.

Ali bought the Rolls shortly after knocking out the erstwhile undefeated George Foreman in the eighth round of their famous Rumble in the Jungle. The fight went down as one of the most famous boxing matches of all time and the most widely speculated with over a billion television viewers. It was a highlight of Ali’s career and evidently worth celebrating.

And celebrate he did by purchasing this car in New Jersey for just over £12,000. That would be worth about £190k in today’s money (adjusted for inflation), or nearly $250k in equivalent 2018 US dollars – which is still nearly $100k short of what a new Dawn would cost you today. But even with the celebrity provenance, Bonhams estimates it’s worth about €50k (or ~$60k). There’s no telling how the car’s history might affect bidders at Place Albert de Knokke Le Zoute on October 5, so we’ll just have to wait and see.