Gooding & Company Sells Most Expensive Car of the Year

This past year was a big one for the classic car market, with what seemed like record results in just about every category and location. But among all the events and cars that crossed the block this year, one stood out as the most expensive — the 1995 McLaren F1 offered at Gooding & Company’s Pebble Beach Auction in August, which brought a new world record $20,465,000 for the model and set the bar for the year.

F1 values have been the rise for over a decade now. As Auction Analyst Chad Tyson said in Linkage #005, “There are only 64 of these in the world. They don’t come up for sale often, let alone at public auction… This was the going rate for the day, but all one must do is keep bidding, as Mr. Charlie Ross states. And bidding, and bidding, and bidding…”

Prior to the Gooding sale, RM Sotheby’s sold an LM-spec F1 at its Monterey sale in 2019. That car set a record at the time when it made $19,805,000 — eclipsing the then record $15,620,000 achieved by Bonhams when it sold an F1 in Carmel in 2017. So this shouldn’t serve as much of a surprise — Gooding’s car had the right specs, nearly no miles (242 total), and hit the market at a place and time when blue-chip cars were already soaring. 

As for Gooding, they achieved $150m in total in 2021 from an impressive line-up of both in-person and Geared Online events here in the US and in the UK. They sold 1,044 lots, including 36 cars at over $1m each. As such, their average price per lot was an exceptional market-leading $608,014 — which goes to show just what kind of cars the company draws to its sales, and how the upper levels of the market have grown throughout 2020 and 2021.

Next up is Gooding’s Geared Online event in Scottsdale in January, followed by their in-person Amelia Island event in March. See the consignments here.