$115 Million Was Just Friday Night At The Monterey

At the Monterey auction, the real protagonist was The Driver's Philosophy Collection, which reached $53,359,500 and showed exactly where serious collector appetite is heading: cars with extreme rarity still matter, but machines that combine rarity with visceral driving experience are commanding the fiercest money.

Its star was a yellow 2023 Ferrari Daytona SP3, sold for $17.825 million, far beyond its $10 million to $12 million estimate. One of 600 examples, its naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 produces 829 horsepower, placing it in an increasingly desirable category of modern hypercars built around spectacular engineering before electrification becomes dominant.

Yet Monterey's biggest lesson required looking across all three nights.

The 1996 McLaren F1 GTR chassis 10R arrived later in the sale and achieved $34.655 million, setting public-auction records for McLaren and for a British-built automobile. Its value rests on a wonderfully unreasonable concentration of provenance: it was McLaren's own development car, one of only two short-tail GTR prototypes, wore the unique factory "Pop Art" livery and spent 25 years with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason.

At the opposite end of automotive history, pre-war coachbuilding proved equally capable of extracting millions. Clark Gable's 1935 Duesenberg Model JN Convertible Coupe brought $9.08 million, while the spectacular 1937 Delage D8-120 S Aerodynamic Coupe by Pourtout reached $5.78 million. The latter had already won Pebble Beach Best of Show in 2005 and became a new auction benchmark for Delage.

That coexistence is what makes Monterey fascinating. Buyers paid eight figures for a 2020s Ferrari and eight figures for machinery conceived when automobile bodies were still shaped by specialist coachbuilders. The common denominator was never age. It was irreproducibility.

In Monterey's collector economy, the most expensive car is increasingly the one whose particular combination of history, engineering and provenance can never be assembled again. Not only a theatre for old cars, the Monterey is also the debut stage of the iconic Louis Vuitton x Porsche 911 collaboration.