Awesome Coin Minted For Car Nerds

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Ten million bucks for a Ferrari 250 GTO? Fuhgeddaboudit. Pick up some change from the Isle of Man and you can get one for two pounds.

If you give the above photograph some careful study, you'll spot a number of items characteristically British. Those two faucets, for instance. You'll see that colonial inventions—in this case, the mixer faucet patented by the Canadian Thomas Campbell in 1880—did not always make their way back to the mother-ship, necessitating a dreary shuffle after every trip to the bathroom with two jets of water, one freezing, the other piping hot. You will also notice a copy of the first issue of Wired UK, published last week, and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood, a passage of which was used in perhaps the most beautiful car commercial ever made, Volkswagen’s 2007 UK spot for the Mark V Golf titled Night Driving.

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Direct your gaze now to the heap of change on the tiles. The large bi-metallic coins are worth £2, have Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse and will buy you a cup of coffee and a bag of Maltesers. The reverse is unremarkable on the most common English version, but if you’re lucky, you can get one from the Isle of Man. A hilly, windswept patch of land in the Irish Sea notable for its lack of speed limits, the Tourist Trophy motorcycle race and the fact that the 1998 minting of their £2 coin has a Ferrari 250 GTO on the tails side.

If you don’t have the patience to receive it as change in the UK, you can pick one up on eBay for £8.