Meet the nuclear engineer with a thing for fast cars and boats

Times

09-05-2025

Jacques Sicotte likes speed — and collecting. The French nuclear engineer has dabbled in watches, and for 15 years he raced a 1931 America's Cup 12-metre class sailboat that was once owned by the Agnelli family, the founders of Fiat. Fitting, as the Canadian could pass for a silver-haired Italian industrialist.
But it is engines and pistons, on land and water, that really set his heart racing.
For a runabout from his home on the Côte d'Azur, he has a £1.75 million Swedish J Craft speedboat that allows him to bypass the traffic on the Riviera and gives him the same thrill, he says, as skiing on fresh powder snow. 'When the Med is flat I can reach 42 knots, which is really fast for a yacht weighing 12 tons,' he says. However, he has also been known to use it for the after-school run for his two teenage children.
His first love, though, is his collection of 60 cars, which are meticulously stored in his garage. It's a passion that dates back to his childhood. 'When I was growing up in Montreal, my friend and I would go to a scrapyard at the weekend and buy old Volkswagens, which we would bring back home on a trailer, chop up and make dune buggies out of,' he says.
Several decades later it's not welded-together Beetles that populate his garage — 'they never came back in one piece, by the way, we'd always wreck them in the sand dunes' — but mostly vintage and Italian classics: Ferraris, Alfa Romeos and Maseratis. His garage is his happy place: 'When things get a little stressful, I go and sit in there. The smell of these old engines with their leather interiors … it's really unique.'
It has been a long journey from Canada to the south of France for this connoisseur of the automotive world. Along the way his priorities as a collector have shifted. 'In my late thirties I was mainly into American muscle cars. I remember going on honeymoon back in Montreal in a '57 Corvette.' It was, Sicotte says, about the performance. 'I liked having these rugged cars, with their amazing accelerations. But when I came to Europe, I started to collect older Ferraris and Maseratis — and it wasn't so much the performance that appealed, it was the style, it was the beauty.'
He cites his 1961 E-Type Jaguar as 'one of the most beautiful cars ever made', and singles out his Ferrari Dino: 'The 206, the coupé, I mean, the shape … if you look at it from the side — these curves, this sensuality. It's unique. It's not performance, it's beauty.' These cars were designed by passionate people, which is why they inspire passion: 'I love the sound,' he says, but not just of the engine. 'A manual Ferrari has a very particular stick shift, and click, clack, clack is the sound it makes.'
Sicotte says he is now more a fan of aesthetics than adrenaline, but he still enjoys the thrill of the drive. Among his collection there are some modern state-of-the-art machines that he races. 'I do what we call the Ferrari Series, where we drive race cars on F1 circuits, like the 488 Challenge that has won Le Mans. It is competitive, but how shall I put it … people are careful not to break the car.' Nonetheless, it's exhilarating. 'Racing on the track is the only way you can find out how technologically advanced these cars are. You're pushing almost 280 kilometres an hour.'
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Does he drive his more classic motors too? 'I make a point of it,' he says. Although, he adds, 'they're not really cars any more — some are now considered industrial art. The record at auction for a Ferrari 250 GTO is $51.7 million, and there are a lot of private sales with higher prices.' He has gone from buying US muscle cars for a couple of thousand dollars to owning, among others, an extremely rare 1996 Ferrari F50 in Giallo Modena (the original Ferrari yellow), which may be worth as much as £6 million today.
Yet Sicotte is not motivated only by investment. 'As I say to my wife, Linda, I can't sell them. We love them too much,' he says. Linda is involved in making sure that the cars and motorboat are kept in perfect condition, particularly in terms of the restoration and colour combinations of interiors. 'We recently discussed how strange it is that the collection is worth so much more than any property we own.'
What he is determined to do is enjoy his machines. 'I do car club events where we drive our classics for a day or two, right up to the big classic events, like the Mille Miglia, which I did a few years ago. That's a four-day event where you drive a thousand gruelling miles in an eligible classic, and to be eligible you need to have exactly the type of car that took part when this was a real race in the 1950s.' Disarmingly, his entry was his Austin-Healey 100.
He also takes part in the Ferrari Cavalcades. 'For these yearly events you need to have a Ferrari that's 100 per cent original. It's a four-day, 700km event through the Alps or in Sicily. Last year it was in Morocco.'
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As with artworks, the provenance of a classic car is important, Sicotte says, and it's part of the fascination. He talks of his Alfa Romeo 2500 S, one of only three or four made. 'It's one of my favourites: the engine and the chassis were built before the war in 1938 or 1939, and then the aluminium body was added in 1946 — it always wins best in show!'
For a true classic, several elements are required, Sicotte says: 'You need beauty, you need style, but you also need scarcity. If they are a dime a dozen, they never become collectables.'
More than anything, this enthusiast believes that he is preserving a piece of history. 'I always tell my kids, 'We don't own these very rare cars. We're just custodians for the next generations. We take care of them, we refurbish them, we pamper them, we show them, and then hopefully you will pass them on to your kids, and then your kids will do the same. And in 100 years people will say, 'My God, where did these come from? From another planet?' And they'll say, 'No, my great-grandfather owned them.''