A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe once owned by Carroll Shelby himself sold for $42,905,000 at Gooding Christie’s Pebble Beach auction on August 15, 2026, according to the auction house — the highest price ever paid for an American car at auction.

Key Points

• Chassis CSX2300 sold for $42,905,000 including buyer’s premium, smashing the prior American-car auction record by more than $17 million.
• The previous record — $22 million for a 1935 Duesenberg Model SSJ — had stood since Gooding & Company sold that car in 2018.
• Shelby personally owned CSX2300 from 1975 to 1998, the only Daytona Coupe he ever owned himself out of the six ever built.
• The car helped Shelby American beat Ferrari for the 1965 FIA International Championship for GT Manufacturers.

CSX2300 wasn’t built to sit in a garage. Carroll Shelby’s team designed the Daytona Coupe specifically to take down Ferrari’s 250 GTO in international GT racing, and this chassis delivered — competing at Daytona and Sebring before heading to Europe for the Nürburgring and Reims under Alan Mann Racing as part of Shelby American’s 1965 FIA GT championship season, when Shelby beat Ferrari outright in the over-2.0-liter class. The car’s racing career didn’t stop there: it went on to Japan, winning the All Japan Suzuka and Diamond Trophy Fuji events in 1966, making it the only Daytona Coupe that kept racing beyond Shelby American’s factory program.

The car disappeared from public view for years before historian Michael L. Shoen rediscovered it and brokered its sale to Carroll Shelby, who bought back the coupe he’d built a decade earlier. Shelby kept it for 23 years, restoring it to 1965 specification and showing it at SAAC-9 in 1994 and the Cobra 30th Reunion at Sonoma in 1995 before selling it in 1998. Gooding & Christie’s had listed the car with a pre-sale estimate of “in excess of $25,000,000” — the final price nearly doubled that number.

Only six Cobra Daytona Coupes were ever built, and this is the first to top the $40 million mark at auction. The result also reset the record for any American automobile sold publicly, a mark that had been held by prewar coachbuilt classics rather than postwar racing cars for most of the last decade. For a genre of car built to be raced hard and often wrecked, a result this size for a Cobra with real competition history — rather than a pristine, never-raced example — is itself notable.