Chassis 003 of the 1963 Corvette Grand Sport sold for $18,705,000 including fees at RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction on August 15, 2026, making it the most expensive Corvette ever sold at public auction and one of the priciest American competition cars in history, according to RM Sotheby’s own auction result page for the car. The price blew past its pre-sale estimate by roughly $7.7 million.

Only five Corvette Grand Sports were ever built, and chassis 003 was the first of just three coupes among them, making it rarer than a Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe or a Ferrari 250 GTO by raw production numbers. Chevrolet engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov designed the car as a lightweight factory competition prototype meant to take on Carroll Shelby’s Cobras on track, but General Motors’ corporate ban on factory racing killed the program before it could go further, according to RM Sotheby’s lot description.

A genuine racer, not a showroom queen

What separates chassis 003 from a typical restomod is that it actually raced. Under Dick Doane and the John Mecom Racing Team, the car ran the 1963 Nassau Speed Week and finished second in class, then went to the 1964 Sebring 12 Hours, where A.J. Foyt and John Cannon drove it to a second-in-class, 23rd-overall finish. It returned to Sebring in 1965 for a third-in-class result. Notable names who drove the car during its competition years include Foyt, Jim Hall, Augie Pabst and Dick Thompson, RM Sotheby’s history shows.

Beneath the body sits an all-aluminum 377-cubic-inch V-8 built to produce more than 600 horsepower, paired with an M21 transmission upgraded to M22 close-ratio specification. At roughly 1,900 pounds, the car weighs dramatically less than a production 1963 Sting Ray, a byproduct of Duntov’s original goal of shaving weight anywhere he could to keep pace with the Cobras.

A meticulous, million-dollar restoration

The car’s current owner, a California collector who has held it since 2003, commissioned Terry Scarborough Racing for a restoration completed between 2003 and 2007. That effort logged more than 4,000 labor hours and roughly $1 million to return the car to its authentic 1964 Sebring livery. The work paid off in the show world as well as the sale room: the car earned Bloomington Gold Special Collection Certificate status in 1994, entered the Bloomington Gold Hall of Fame in 1997, and picked up a National Corvette Restorers Society Special Interest Award in 2002.

The Grand Sport’s $18.7 million result also landed it as the third most expensive American car ever sold at auction overall, according to GM Authority’s tally of the Monterey Car Week results — trailing only a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe that sold for $42.9 million at Gooding & Christie’s the day before, a sale that Gooding & Christie’s own results page confirms set the outright American-car auction record. Even short of that broader mark, chassis 003’s price stands as the high point for any Corvette ever sold and underscores how aggressively collectors are now chasing America’s rarest factory-built racers, a segment long overshadowed by European exotica at the top of the market.