Jacques Sicotte is the kind of collector who makes even the most seasoned automotive insiders pause, a nuclear physics engineer turned entrepreneur whose self-made success has allowed him to assemble one of the world’s most remarkable private garages. His latest acquisition, unveiled at Maserati’s historic Viale Ciro Menotti plant in Modena, captured that reputation perfectly. Maserati gathered its designers, engineers, and Chief Test Driver Andrea Bertolini to present him with the MCXtrema, a 740-horsepower track car limited to 62 examples worldwide. Sicotte’s car arrived in a matte blue and pearl white livery inspired by the MC12 Stradale, with the number 77 painted on its doors. It is his chosen racing number, but it also nods to his profession, since 77 is the atomic number of iridium.
Sicotte was born in Canada and now lives in the south of France. He is often described as a Franco-Canadian engineer with a doctoral-level background in nuclear physics, someone who built his life through work rather than inheritance. That detail matters because it shapes his philosophy of collecting.
He is known for telling his children that they never truly own the cars in their care, that they are simply custodians preserving them for the next generation. The line captures his approach to machines that other people see only as assets. His enthusiasm began far from Modena. He grew up in Montreal, where weekends meant dragging home old Volkswagens from scrapyards, cutting them apart, and turning them into dune buggies. His early tastes leaned toward American muscle cars, and he still recalls driving a 1957 Corvette on his honeymoon.
As his career progressed and his understanding of engineering deepened, his tastes evolved from raw Detroit power to the poise and artistry of Italian machinery. He describes this shift as moving from performance for its own sake to beauty, history and craftsmanship.
Today, that evolution is reflected in a garage widely described as one of the most impressive private car collections in the world. It consists of more than sixty cars, most of them Italian. The centerpiece examples alone place him in the top tier of global collectors. He owns a Maserati MC12, the road-going homologation version of the GT1 racer, one of roughly fifty road cars ever produced. He also owns a Ferrari F50 in Giallo Modena, a colour far rarer and bolder than Rosso Corsa, and a Ferrari Enzo, the turn of the millennium flagship that connected the analog era to modern supercar technology. Several historic Alfa Romeos round out his deep appreciation for Italian heritage.
What makes his garage interesting is not just the value but the curation. The F50 represents pure mid-1990s engineering, while the Enzo represents the shift into the early 2000s, the MC12 the pinnacle of period GT1 dominance, and the MCXtrema the newest chapter in Maserati’s performance story. Taken together, they form a timeline of Italian breakthroughs. From his home in the south of France, framed by the Riviera and a fast day boat he uses along the coast, Sicotte treats these machines as moving pieces of history and keeps them alive for the next custodians to come.
