The most expensive British car ever sold at auction is just one of many world record prices that were achieved at the collectors’ car auctions during Monterey Car Week in the California. Here’s our world record round-up…
That would be the 1970 917 K – the actual Jo Siffert-owned car that was the Porsche star of the film Le Mans. Gooding & Co sold it at its Pebble Beach auction for US$14.08m (including premium) — making it the most valuable Porsche ever sold at auction. The previous record was for a 1982 Porsche 956 which sold for $10.1m in 2015.
The totally gorgeous 275 GTB/C, one of just a dozen competition versions of the V12 Berlinetta, set a new world record for the model when it was sold by Gooding & Co for US$14.52m
Other Gooding & Co record highs were achieved for a 1956 Maserati A6G/54 that sold for US$4.4m, a 1958 BMW 507 Series II that garnered US$2.75m, and a 1926 Mercedes 24/100/140 Phaeton that went for nearly double its estimate with a sale price of $726,000.
Bonhams billed this sale at its Quail Lodge auction as a “once in a lifetime opportunity to buy what for many is the ultimate road car” and the words certainly rang true with one collector who paid out US$15,620,000 for it including the premium, which translates to £12,132,509. The F1 is number 44 of the 64 road cars built and the first to cross the pond and be made US street legal.
By now the world knows there is a new British champion of the auction rooms. The ex-Moss/Salvadori/Shelby Aston Martin DBR1 chassis number one has displaced the Jaguar D-type as most expensive Brit car ever sold at auction. RM Sotheby’s had the honour of selling this wonderful machine, and it went for $22,550,000 including the premium. That’s three-quarters of a million ahead of the Jag when it was sold by RM last year.
The DBR1 wasn’t the end of the Aston story at RM’s Monterey sale, with the 1959 Aston Martin DB4GT prototype selling for $6,765,000, a record for an Aston without a Zagato body. Another Aston record for the model type was the US$616,000 achieved by a 2006 DBR9.
Other world record highs by model type achieved by RM include:
Bonhams
gooding and co
rm auctions