The Auction Block Just Rewrote History In Monterey

Monterey Car Week 2026 didn't just have a good year — it had the best year the collector car market has ever seen. When the gavels went quiet on the Peninsula, the week's auctions had moved $747.9 million in cars, a 73% jump over 2025 and a number that obliterated the previous all-time high of $471 million set back in 2022. For anyone who's spent the last few years wondering whether the market had a ceiling, Monterey just answered that question.

And two sales in particular are the ones the whole community will be talking about for years: a race-bred Shelby that beat Ferrari on the track six decades ago and just beat every other American car at auction, and Ferrari's own first electric production car, which sold for enough to buy roughly sixty of them.

The Cobra That Out-Earned Everything American

Carroll Shelby built exactly six Daytona Coupes for one reason: to beat Ferrari's 250 GTO at its own game. CSX2300 did more than that — it helped Shelby American win the 1965 FIA International Championship for GT Manufacturers, ending Ferrari's stranglehold on the over-2.0-liter GT class. That's the kind of provenance you can't manufacture.

Six decades later, the car that raced under Shelby's own banner — and later in Japan under privateer Tadashi Sakai, the only Daytona Coupe to keep racing after the factory program wound down — sold for $42,905,000 at Gooding Christie's Pebble Beach sale. Hammer price alone was $39 million. The result makes it not just the most expensive Shelby ever sold, but the most expensive American car ever sold at public auction, period — smashing the previous record of $22 million set by a 1935 Duesenberg SSJ back in 2018. Nearly double, in one sale.

Under the bodywork, it's still just a 289-cubic-inch Ford V8 making roughly 385 horsepower, capable of topping 180 mph. Simple, brutal, and now the most valuable thing this country has ever put four wheels under.

Ferrari's First EV Just Sold For 36x Its Estimate

If the Daytona Coupe sale was about six decades of racing pedigree, the Luce sale was about something else entirely: pure ceremony. Chassis 0 — the very first production example of Ferrari's first battery-electric car — carried a pre-sale estimate of just $1.1 million. It sold for $40 million. Thirty-six times estimate, and roughly 62 times what the Luce retails for on Ferrari's own price list.

The car itself is a showpiece: a custom "Madreperla Semi-Gloss" finish that shifts from green to violet depending on the light, Le Mans metallic leather in Perla with Grigio Corvara accents, bespoke wheels and brake calipers, and a Ferrari shield set against an optical white background — all built through Ferrari's Tailor Made personalization program. Every dollar went to the Ferrari Foundation, a 501(c)(3) supporting educational programs, and RM Sotheby's waived the buyer's premium and ran it with no reserve to make sure of it.

It's now the second most valuable Ferrari ever sold at auction — trailing only the $48.4 million 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO by less than $8.5 million — and it beat Ferrari's previous modern-era record (a $26 million Daytona SP3 from August 2025) by 54%. The buyer won't even take delivery until Q1 2027; the car heads back to Maranello first for final assembly.

The Rest Of The Leaderboard

• 1996 McLaren F1 — $34.7 million, a new record for any British car sold at auction.
• 1963 Ferrari 250 P Spider — $18.7 million.
• 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport — $18.7 million, a new Corvette record.
• Best of Show, Pebble Beach Concours — a 1935 Duesenberg SSJ Special Speedster, one of just two ever built and once owned by Clark Gable.

Beyond the headline lots, the broader numbers tell the real story: 844 of 1,124 cars offered found new owners — a 75% sell-through rate — and the average sale price across the entire week jumped 64%, to $866,107. Modern supercars from the 1990s onward accounted for more than half of everything sold, a sign that the market's center of gravity keeps shifting toward cars a lot of us grew up with.

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What It Means For The Rest Of Us

You don't need a Daytona Coupe or a Ferrari with a four-year waitlist to feel the effects of a week like this. Records at the top of the market are a signal for everything underneath it — they tell you buyers are confident, sellers are motivated, and the enthusiast market as a whole is only getting stronger. That's exactly the environment we built BIDR for.