A Le Mans-bred McLaren F1 GTR sold for $34,655,000 at RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale this month, making it the most valuable McLaren F1 and the most valuable British car ever sold at auction — anchoring a weekend that pulled in a record $380 million across the sale, according to RM Sotheby’s own results page.

One correction to the record books worth making up front: the McLaren wasn’t actually the top seller of the weekend. That distinction went to a one-off 2026 Ferrari Luce “Tailor Made” electric road car, which sold for $40,000,000 — a charity lot benefiting the Ferrari Foundation that ran roughly 36 times its pre-sale estimate, per CNN. What the McLaren did do is out-hammer every other car in the sale, road-legal or not, and become the most expensive competition car with real race history to cross the block all weekend.

The Top of the Board

• 2026 Ferrari Luce “Tailor Made” — $40,000,000. A bespoke, all-electric one-off built on Ferrari’s roughly $640,000-base Luce platform, sold with proceeds going to the Ferrari Foundation’s Maranello education campus.
• 1996 McLaren F1 GTR, chassis 10R — $34,655,000. One of only two F1 GTR “Short-Tail” prototypes and the first of nine cars built to the definitive 1996 specification — the fastest GTR variant McLaren ever produced. It ran winter testing at Magny-Cours with works drivers JJ Lehto and David Brabham and turned laps at the 1996 24 Hours of Le Mans during pre-qualifying before McLaren converted it for road use; Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason owned it for 25 years before a 2024 private sale, according to RM Sotheby’s lot listing.
• 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport — $18,705,000. One of just five Grand Sports GM built before killing the factory racing program — a genuine pure-race car with no road-going pretense, and it still outsold two Ferrari hypercars further down the board.
• 2023 Ferrari Daytona SP3 — $17,825,000. A modern, strictly-limited V12 halo car and one of the priciest current-production Ferraris ever built.
• 1995 Ferrari F50 — $12,105,000, rounding out the top five and continuing Ferrari’s dominance of the sale’s upper ranks, per duPont Registry’s results recap.

Why a Race Car Beating Road Cars Actually Matters

Road-legal hypercars get built in the dozens or hundreds and, however special, they’re still catalog cars — order one with the right allocation and enough money, and you get one. A GTR like chassis 10R can’t be replicated: it’s a factory competition prototype with a documented Le Mans test history, one of a handful ever converted to the road, and it carries the ownership pedigree of a rock drummer who kept it for a quarter century. Rarity backed by real race history is what pushed a track-honed prototype past every road-going hypercar in the building except a one-off electric concept car sold for charity.

That’s also why the Corvette Grand Sport’s $18.7 million result belongs in the same conversation. It isn’t a Ferrari, it isn’t a McLaren, and it was never road-legal in period — GM built it purely to go racing, then pulled the plug before it got the chance to compete factory-backed. Both it and the McLaren prove the same point from opposite ends of the price ladder: buyers at this level are paying a premium for cars that did something, not just cars that look fast sitting still.

Total sales across the weekend hit $380 million, the highest total in the auction’s 29-year history at Monterey, according to Old Cars Weekly’s coverage of the sale. Between a charity EV concept, a Le Mans-tested GTR, and a five-off factory racer all landing in the top three, the message from Monterey this year is that provenance and competition history are outrunning raw specification sheets — even when the spec sheet belongs to a McLaren F1.