I’ve wanted to visit the Fox Collection in Melbourne for over 10 years. I used to have a job where I would commute to Melbourne twice a month but the opening hours never lined up with when I was there.
This weekend I am traveling through Melbourne and happened to have the Saturday morning fee. I went along for the morning with my kids. The Fox Collection is a part of the personal collection of Lindsay Fox, an Australian trucking magnate. Lindsay Fox is now 87, and has been collecting these cars for years. As well as the public part of the collection, there are apparently another 300 or so cars out near Essendon Airport.
The collection is housed in a heritage warehouse in the Melbourne Docklands area. This makes it very easy to get to. There is also plenty of parking if you are a local.
The collection is housed over two floors. On the ground floor, there is a general room with high end cars on one side, and performance cars on the other. There are also a couple of trucks from the early years of Mr Fox’s trucking empire.
Additionally on the ground floor is the Ferrari Room. Upstairs there is a Mercedes-Benz room and a Porsche Room. Nearly all the cars are pretty special. In the general room you have cars like a Mercedes-Benz 540K Roadster (my favourite) along with an Derby Bentley and an Austin Healy 100S. The room also contains the only remaining Rolls Royce Camarge prototype. The Ferrari room contained an F40, F50, Enzo, 288GTO and a 246Dino. From this room I would take the 288GTO. Its not the most valuable, but the one I would like to drive. That assumes I would fit in.
Upstairs the Porsche room has a collection of rare 356s as well as some other interesting cars from Porsche’s heritage and a few modern sports cars. In the Mercedes Benz room there is a Gullwing, a Pagoda, 190SL plus some very rare performance cars like a McLaren Mercedes, SL73, SLR and others. There is also one of only two AMG A38 cars, a twin engine version of the little city car. I would take the Gullwing.
I enjoyed the Museum. About an hour is all you really need. The museum focuses on quality rather than quantity. Still, given there are around 300 extra cars, I think the could easily fit another 10-20 cars in the space at the docklands which would be a useful improvement to the museum.
Regardless I would recommend the museum if you have an hour or so free in Melbourne on a Saturday morning or Thursday.
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