Gooding Christie’s Amelia Island Auctions moved $72,132,800 in classic and collector cars across two days in March 2026, with a 94% sell-through rate on the 16th running of the sale. The top lot, a 1960 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider, brought more than $16.5 million — enough, according to Gooding Christie’s own press release, to make it “the highest selling car from all three major auction houses in Florida” that entire week. None of it generated anywhere near the coverage Monterey Car Week pulls every August, even though the dollar figures tell a comparable story. The sale ran March 5–6 at the Omni Amelia Island Resort in Florida — the 16th consecutive year Gooding has held an auction at that venue — with 124 of an estimated 132 lots finding buyers.
The Top Lot Outsold Every Other Auction House in Town
Amelia Island shares its March weekend with rival sales from other major houses, which makes the California Spider’s result more than just a nice number for Gooding Christie’s. The car’s price tag didn’t just top its own sale — the company’s release specifically credits it as the single highest sale recorded anywhere during that week’s entire run of Florida auctions, a detail that says as much about the strength of a single collector’s willingness to pay as it does about the overall market.
Marque and Model Records Piled Up Beyond the Top Lot
The headline number is only part of the story. A 1932 Miller FWD Special sold for $3,305,000, setting a new marque record, while a 1951 Ferrari 212 Export Spider once owned by Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini brought $3,415,000, the kind of provenance-driven premium that consistently outperforms a car’s mechanical specs alone. A 2005 Porsche Carrera GT sold for $3,112,500, more than double its pre-sale estimate. Further down the board, a 1969 Lamborghini Miura P400 S set a new model record at $2,590,000, a 1974 Ferrari Dino 246 GTS set its own model record at $1,325,000, and a 1992 Mercedes-Benz 500E brought $357,000 — roughly triple the previous record for that model, according to Gooding Christie’s results. A 1969 Porsche 911 GT-S also crossed the block at $357,000 in what the company says was the model’s first-ever auction sale.
A Venue That Keeps Climbing, Even in Its “Second-Best” Year
What makes 2026’s total notable is that it actually beat the year before. In March 2025, Gooding Christie’s Amelia Island sale realized $67,427,210 across 133 of 144 lots, led by a $9,465,000 Ferrari 375 MM Berlinetta from the Fred Leydorf Collection and a world-record $6,055,000 sale of a 1989 RUF CTR “Yellowbird.” A year later, the venue topped $72 million — a roughly 7% jump — even though David Gooding, the company’s president, described it in the same release as “our second highest sales total recorded in our 16 years at the venue, as well as a 94% sell-through rate.” Head of sale David Brynan added: “We continue to be the go-to auction house for sophisticated, historically significant cars, and although modern supercars garner much attention, our outstanding results for best-of-category connoisseur’s cars speak to our strength in terms of expertise, presentation, and most importantly, dedication to quality.”
Why This Sale Flies Under the Radar
Amelia Island’s auction week runs opposite the Florida winter social calendar rather than the car-media calendar, and results from March sales routinely get a fraction of the write-ups that Monterey’s August week receives — despite regularly producing nine-figure combined totals across the venue’s competing auction houses. Hagerty’s own market coverage flagged 14 individually notable cars from this specific sale, evidence that the substance was there even without the spectacle.
The Pattern Underneath the Number
Two things can be true about the collector car market at once: the eye-popping single sales still come from marquee summer weeks, and the money keeps compounding quietly in the shoulder seasons. A venue that can post its second-best result ever, beat last year’s total by millions, set marque and model records on cars most casual buyers have never heard of, and still barely register outside the trade press says less about Amelia Island’s importance and more about how much of this market simply isn’t being watched by anyone outside it.