Unless you’ve been living under a rock with your hands clamped firmly over your ears for the past week or so, you’ll no doubt be aware of tonight’s record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot draw.
A global record, if you’re lucky enough to be the winner you’ll instantly jump to #1,250 of the Forbes list of global billionaires, squeezed in between Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel and Ford heiress/Detroit Lions owner Martha Ford.
Of course, if you want the entire lot you’ll have to choose the 30-year annuity option; going for the one-off lump sum means that Uncle Sam will quickly relieve you of 25 per cent off the top. Even still, it’s a heck of a lot of money, so what could you do with it all?
As it turns out, if you’re a car fan who's fortunate enough to beat the 1 in 292 million odds, a lot…
Buy 555 LaFerrari FXX-Ks
We’ve already covered the standard LaFerrari in our list of the world’s most expensive options, so straight off the bat you’ll know that this won’t come cheap. Yet for all its expensiveness, the LaFerrari is still held back by one thing – the law.
Emissions standards, safety equipment and the like add considerable restrictions, so for the track-only FXX K version, the car bows only to physics and how fat your wallet is.
For $2.3 million, the LaFerrari FXX K comes with a downright silly 1,035 horsepower, and with your Powerball winnings you’d be able to buy an entire fleet of 555 of the things.
Not that there even are that many; less than 40 were built, all of which sold out pretty much instantaneously. Still, with $1.5 billion in your back pocket you’ll surely be able to work something out.
Build your own race track
Along with a house, buying a flash new car is probably at the very top of the vast majority of lottery players’ priority lists. Still, what’s the point in having a super-quick supercar if you don’t have anywhere to race it?
You might want to take a leaf out of Dutch millionaire Klaas Zwart’s book. After making his fortune by developing a new type of drill head for oil drillers, he built his own personal race track in the south of Spain.
The resulting Ascari Race Resort is made up of corners hand-picked from the greatest circuits in the world, including Silverstone and Monza, while it cost an estimated $100 million to build.
Buy Silverstone circuit
If you don’t fancy building your own, you could always instead opt to buy a circuit that somebody else has already created. How about arguably the most famous circuit in the world?
As it happens, Jaguar Land Rover is reportedly in negotiations to buy Silverstone for a sum of up to $75 million, and is planning to turn the Northamptonshire complex into its new headquarters.
If that’s not good enough, you could even go one step further and buy the entire Nurburgring complex in Germany, which was last sold back in 2014 for around $107 million. Granted, the Nurburgring was in serious financial difficulties at the time, but what’s $107 million when you’ve just won $1.5 billion?
Run a Formula One team for 16 years
With F1 teams constantly complaining about the financial situation of the sport, people often wonder just how much it costs to keep a team in Formula One. The answer? A lot.
Information compiled by Business Book GP last August showed the budgets each team had to spend on the last Formula One season, with Red Bull’s the highest at $506,992,790. With that in mind, you could afford to keep the team in business for three years with your Powerball winnings.
On the other hand, if you decided to fund the team with the lowest budget, Manor – which had a budget of just $89,781,100 - you could keep yourself in the sport for a massive 16 years, paying for everything from driver salaries to fuel and even wind tunnel testing.
Buy enough fuel to run a Vauxhall Corsa to the moon and back 1,448 times
Given that the average price of petrol in the US currently clocks in at around $4.59 per gallon and the latest Vauxhall Corsa has an average fuel economy of 57.6mpg, you could buy enough fuel to last 326,797,385 miles.
That’s enough to take you across Route 66 136,165 times, lap the Nurburgring’s Nordschleife circuit 23,062,624 times and enough to drive to the moon and back a whopping 1,448 times.
Make your own series of action movies
According to the founder of Hollywood news website Deadline.com, the average budget for a blockbuster film these days is in and around $200m.
With your Powerball winnings, you could feasibly have the funds to make around eight big-budget films starring you and your cars, currently more than all the Fast and the Furious films so far. If they do well, you might even make a profit and catapult yourself even further up the rich list.
Buy 750,000 Tata Nanos
The LaFerrari FXX K might be one of the most expensive cars in the world, but the record for the cheapest model currently goes to the Tata Nano, which has a list price of merely $2,000.
That means that if you win the Powerball jackpot you’ve got the funds to buy 750,000 of the things. Alternatively, you could also get 173,170 Dacia Sanderos or 102,880 Ford Fiestas. Finding somewhere to park all of them might prove a little more difficult, however…
