RM Sotheby’s opened a new chapter in the UK collector car calendar on July 8, 2026, staging its first auction ever held at Woodcote Park, the Royal Automobile Club’s private estate outside Epsom, and walked away with £15,975,765 (about $21.43 million) in total sales. The sale was led by a modified 1990 Ferrari F40 that had once belonged to French motorsport figure Jean Sage, which brought £3,605,000, or roughly $4.84 million, well above its £3.2 million high estimate.
A New Venue, an Old Formula
The Woodcote Park Auction was billed as an all-new UK sale run in partnership with the Royal Automobile Club, and it replaced nothing on RM Sotheby’s existing calendar — it simply added a fresh stop. Sholto Gilbertson, the house’s Director of Sales UK, called the relationship with the club “amongst the most important we have in the UK” after the results came in, and the number backing that claim was hard to argue with. Old Cars Weekly, tracking the results in dollars for American readers, described it as the house’s most successful UK summer sale to date. Forty-two lots crossed the block over the course of the evening.
The Jean Sage F40 Takes the Top Spot
The headline car carried real racing pedigree behind the wheel rather than on the track. Sage, a longtime French motorsport figure best known for managing the Ligier Formula 1 team, bought the F40 new through Paris Ferrari dealer Charles Pozzi in 1990. Four years later he sent the car to Michelotto — the same Padua workshop that built Ferrari’s F40 GTE competition cars — for a CSAI GT-inspired overhaul that pushed output to 527 horsepower while cutting 136 kilograms from the car’s weight. Carbon fiber bucket seats and lightweight trim replaced the factory interior, yet the F40 kept its road registration and its matching-numbers engine and gearbox throughout. RM Sotheby’s catalogued chassis ZFFGJ34B000084642 as a “non-cat, non-adjust” example, the specification purists chase, and bidders responded by pushing the hammer price 13 percent past the high estimate, according to auction data compiled by The Classic Valuer.
A Porsche Nearly Matched It
The F40 didn’t run away with the sale uncontested. A 1993 Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 3.8 “Strassenversion” sold for £3,492,500 (about $4.69 million), landing just behind the Ferrari and clearing its own estimate by more than £1 million. Only two RSR 3.8s were built with a fully trimmed street interior, and this example had covered just 10 kilometers before being stored away for two decades — it only resurfaced in 2015. Between the F40 and the Porsche, the two cars accounted for well over £7 million of the night’s total on their own.
Further down the results sheet, a 1966 Aston Martin DB5 Shooting Brake built by coachbuilder Radford sold for £848,750. RM Sotheby’s noted it as one of just 12 factory-produced DB5 estate conversions, finished in silver over grey wool-tweed and black leather. A standard 1965 DB5 added £792,500 to the tally, and a 1990 BMW M3 Sport Evolution — one of roughly 600 built — brought £404,375, more than £100,000 above its high estimate.
What the Numbers Say About the Market
A $21 million result from a brand-new sale location is a strong signal for a UK collector market that has spent the past couple of years absorbing higher interest rates and softer demand for mid-tier classics. What sold here wasn’t the cheap stuff. Buyers reached deepest for cars with documented, specific histories: a Ferrari tied to a named motorsport figure and reworked by a name-brand tuning house, a barely-driven homologation Porsche, a coachbuilt Aston Martin variant with a single-digit production run. Generic examples of otherwise desirable models filled out the middle of the results sheet rather than driving them.
For RM Sotheby’s, the Woodcote Park debut also functions as a bet on venue matters as much as inventory does. Pairing a sale with the Royal Automobile Club’s concours weekend gives the house a built-in audience of serious collectors already gathered in one place, and a $21 million opening result suggests that formula translated directly into bidding activity. Whether Woodcote Park becomes a fixture on RM Sotheby’s UK calendar or a one-off experiment will likely hinge on whether the house can keep finding cars with stories as strong as the Jean Sage F40’s to lead future sales there.