AUCTION TRACKER
MCLAREN F1
McLaren may have struggled to fill its order book for the £540,000 F1 when it was launched in 1992 during a global recession, but today its rarity and game-changing engineering mark it out as the Holy Grail among collectors.
Finding one of the 64 road cars at auction is never going to be an easy mission. In the past ten years only six have been offered, five of which sold. The following list puts into perspective the F1’s meteoric rise in value over recent years: an ex-Sultan of Brunei F1 with 3200 miles fetched $1,705,000 (£1,395,000) in 2006 at the RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale; four years later Gooding & Co sold a two-owner example with similar miles for $3,575,000 (£2,924,000); by 2013 Gooding had established a new benchmark when it achieved $8,470,000 (£6,928,000) for a German-delivered 13,900-miler.
RM signalled another significant upturn in prices in 2015 when a 6000km F1, upgraded to LM-spec, made $13,750,000 (£11,247,000), before Gooding set the current auction record at $20,465,000 (£16,739,000) for a timewarp car (pictured), finished in Creighton Brown and with only 390km, at Monterey in 2021.
Tom Hartley Jnr, who has sold even more F1s privately, explains the market. ‘This is a road car that needed very few alterations before it went racing in 1995: a passenger seat was removed, a rear wing added, a few body modifications plus very little else and it won the 24 Hours of Le Mans on its first outing.
‘We’ve sold seven different examples in the last few years alone and prices range between $20,000,000 and $30,000,000, depending on mileage, provenance and original specification. However, a GTR recently traded well above $30,000,000 and if one of the LMs were on the market today, the number would probably start with a four! It is important to buy one that hasn’t suffered any major accident damage and has been wellmaintained. We find the best people to service or restore one of these cars are Lanzante – coincidentally also the people who ran the winning car at Le Mans.’