Belgium's Bingo Willy left 100 cars behind, and every one sells with no reserve
A farmer's son built this collection on jukebox coins. Now all of it sells, with no floor
One of Belgium's great private car collections is going under the hammer, and the way it is being sold says more than any single lot. Around 100 cars and motorcycles from the estate of Willy Michiels, the gaming tycoon and three-time mayor of Haaltert known to everyone as Bingo Willy, will cross RM Sotheby's online block from 8 September, and not one of them carries a reserve. No minimum, no safety net, no protecting the trophy prices. This is not a record-chasing sale. It is a farewell.
Who Bingo Willy was
The man behind the collection is a proper Belgian rags-to-riches story. Born in 1937, the son of a farmer in Kerksken, Willy Michiels started placing jukeboxes in cafes in the 1950s, moved into slot machines and bingo, and eventually co-founded the gambling group Napoleon Games, building a fortune from small coins dropped into machines across Flanders. He was elected mayor of Haaltert three times. When he died in 2020, he left behind not just a business empire but one of the most characterful private car hoards in the country, and heirs who have decided it is time to let it go.
The collection is a self-portrait
What Michiels bought tells you exactly who he was. The heart of the collection is classic Mercedes-Benz, dignified rather than flashy, headlined by a 1970 Mercedes-Benz 600 Six-Door Pullman, a 1962 190 SL and, reaching further back, a 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom I limousine. Across roughly 100 vehicles from nearly 30 marques it reads as taste, not trophy-hunting. And it gets wonderfully eccentric at the edges: earlier tranches of the same estate sent more than 100 Porsche tractors and 80 historic horse-drawn carriages to auction. This was a man who collected what he loved, not what a spreadsheet told him would appreciate.
No reserve is the whole story
The absence of reserve prices is easy to skim past, but it is the most revealing detail here. A seller chasing records sets a floor to protect the headline values, the way a rare, low-mileage lot like this near-untouched Porsche RSR heading to auction would normally be guarded. An estate that simply wants the cars to find new homes does the opposite and lets the market decide every price. That makes the WM26 sale unusually honest, and unusually promising for buyers: with no minimums, a patient bidder could land a genuine piece of a serious collection for far less than a reserve auction would ever allow. In auction terms, the doors are wide open.
A very Belgian sale
For us this is a homegrown story, and a bittersweet one. Michiels was not a distant billionaire but a local self-made man, and he once set the record for the most expensive car ever sold at a Belgian auction, paying 1.2 million euro at a 2017 Knokke sale. Now his life's collection, the kind of eclectic, personal hoard that marks a true enthusiast rather than an investor, is being scattered to bidders around the world through a London auction house, even as Belgian car culture keeps its own flame alive at places like Circuit Zolder. A piece of the country's history is quite literally being auctioned off.
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It would be easy to cover this as a numbers story, guessing what the Pullman or the Phantom will bring. But that misses what makes it worth reading. The best car collections are autobiographies, and this one is a particularly good read: a farmer's son who turned jukebox coins into a fortune, became his town's mayor three times, and spent the proceeds on stately Mercedes, a pre-war Rolls-Royce and, gloriously, a shed full of Porsche tractors.
Selling it all with no reserve is the right and slightly heartbreaking final chapter. It means Bingo Willy's taste is now anyone's to inherit, that the market alone will decide what each piece of his life was worth, and that with a little nerve you could park a genuine slice of Belgian history in your own garage this September. If you have ever wanted an heirloom with a story attached, they rarely come better than this. Go and read the catalogue.
