Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 RSR over one million Euros
Auction prices for historic race cars are apparently stabilizing, and the record-breaking spree of recent years seems to have slowed down somewhat at the moment. For example, auction results for a Jaguar D-Type with contemporary racing history have been consistently between the equivalent of three to 3.5 million euros for some time now, for an Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 between approximately two and 2.5 million euros, and for an Austin-Healey 100 S between 900,000 euros and one million. None of these three models set new auction records at RM/Sotheby's in Amelia Island, but the hammer prices achieved there confirmed the still unbroken high price level for sports and racing cars from the 1930s to the 1950s once again.
Ultimately, this fact was further underscored by the Bonhams result for a '55 Frazer Nash Le Mans Coupé at the Goodwood 73rd Members Meeting auction, fetching £466,666 (equivalent to just under €640,000). And this was only the second Frazer Nash ever to cross the block in the Euro era since 2002. In 2011, Coys achieved £225,800 (equivalent to about €273,000 at the time) for a '52 Targa Florio model at the Royal Ascot Racecourse auction, a car that also raced in the 1953 Briggs Cunningham stable at the 12 Hours of Sebring. This year's Bonhams value at Goodwood thus marked a new auction record for the marque.
RM/Sotheby's sold the '55 D-Type for $3,675,000, the second-best auction result for a vehicle of this kind to date (equivalent to approximately 3.45 million euros). This figure was only about 250,000 euros below the result achieved by the same auctioneer for another '55 version at Retromobile in Paris in 2014. According to the auctioneer, the car in Amelia Island was one of the 54 examples that Jaguar produced at the time for private racing drivers. The first owner of XKD 530 was Finn Curt Lincoln from Helsinki, a professional tennis player and amateur racing driver at the time, who later became Jochen Rindt's father-in-law. Lincoln had already achieved two class victories with it in Helsinki in 1956.
The first owner of the '55 Austin-Healey 100 S, which also sold for the second-best result to date for this model series at the same venue for $1,012,000 (approximately 950,000 Euros), was American actor Jackie Cooper, who had already raced it in the 1955 12 Hours of Sebring, among other events.
RM/Sotheby's also achieved the very first result in the Euro era for a Group C/IMSA Jaguar on-site, in this case for the '88 XJR-9, which among other things was the overall winner of the 1990 24 Hours of Daytona. The excellent $2,145,000 (equivalent to about two million euros) currently marks the second-best result for all Group C/IMSA race cars of that era auctioned in the Euro era, behind the 2.352 million euros achieved by the '82 ex-works Porsche 956, sold by RM Auctions at Retromobile in Paris in 2014.
Gooding & Company achieved a sensational new auction world record in Amelia Island for a „74 Porsche Carrera 3.0 RSR, now fetching over one million euros when converted – $1,237,500 for the former Héctor Rebaque “Café Mexicano" car, which notably won overall on its very first outing, the 1974 IMSA 1000 km Mexico City! As late as 1982, the car achieved a class victory at the 12 Hours of Sebring. In the late 1970s, Héctor Rebaque also became known as a Formula 1 driver, accumulating a total of 13 World Championship points until 1981. The previous record for the series was also set by Gooding & Company in 2007 for a '74 ex-Peter Gregg Carrera 3.0 RSR in Pebble Beach, selling for $891,000 (nearly 680,000 euros at the time).
