The Most Expensive Ferraris Ever Sold

On This Page

• The verified auction record
• The results
• Two prices that are not prices
• The currency trap
• The figure that is simply false
• Why the GTO, and how many exist
• What I make of it
• Top Takeaways to Success
• Frequently Asked Questions

The most expensive Ferrari ever sold cannot be verified, and the man who bought it says the reported price is too low.

In 2018 David MacNeil bought a 1963 250 GTO, chassis 4153 GT, in a private transaction reported at around $70 million. There is no auctioneer, no lot number, no published result. The figure rests on confirmation by the Ferrari historian Marcel Massini and on press reporting. MacNeil later told Magneto he paid well more than $70 million.

So the headline number in this category is an unaudited handshake, quoted to the nearest ten million, that the buyer has publicly described as understated.

Everything below it is better evidenced, and the gap between those two kinds of number is what this page is about.

The verified auction record

$51,705,000, for a 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti, chassis 3765 LM, at RM Sotheby’s in New York on 13 November 2023.

The hammer was $47,000,000. The remaining $4.7 million is buyer’s premium, and most reporting quotes only the larger figure without saying which is which.

That result displaced chassis 3413 GT, which made $48,405,000 at RM Sotheby’s Monterey in August 2018 on a hammer of $44,000,000.

Those two chassis numbers get swapped constantly, including in reference material I was working from when I started this page. 3765 LM is the New York car and the current record. 3413 GT is the Monterey car it beat.

The results

Prices realised, premium included. Currency as sold.

#	Car	Chassis	Price	Sale
1	1963 250 GTO	4153 GT	~$70,000,000	Private sale, 2018
2	1962 330 LM / 250 GTO	3765 LM	$51,705,000	RM Sotheby’s, 13 Nov 2023
3	1962 250 GTO	3413 GT	$48,405,000	RM Sotheby’s, Aug 2018
4	2026 Ferrari Luce	0	$40,000,000	RM Sotheby’s, 15 Aug 2026, charity
5	1962 250 GTO, Bianco Speciale	3729 GT	$38,500,000	Mecum, Jan 2026, provisional
6	1962 250 GTO	3851 GT	$38,115,000	Bonhams, 14 Aug 2014
7	1964 250 LM	5893	€34,880,000	RM Sotheby’s Paris, Feb 2025
8	1957 335 S Spider Scaglietti	0674	€32,075,200	Artcurial Paris, 5 Feb 2016
9	1967 412P Berlinetta	0854	$30,255,000	Bonhams, 18 Aug 2023
10	1956 290 MM	0626	$28,050,000	RM Sotheby’s, 10 Dec 2015
11	1967 275 GTB/4*S NART Spider	10709	$27,500,000	RM Auctions, 17 Aug 2013
12	1964 275 GTB/C Speciale	06701	$26,400,000	RM Auctions, 16 Aug 2014
13	2025 Daytona SP3, 600th built	n/a	$26,000,000	RM Sotheby’s, Aug 2025, charity
14	1961 250 GT SWB California Spider Comp.	2383 GT	$25,305,000	Gooding Christie’s, 15 Aug 2025, lot 26
15	1962 250 GT SWB California Spyder	2935 GT	€16,288,000	Artcurial, 6 Feb 2015
16	1959 250 GT LWB California Spyder Comp.	1603 GT	$18,150,000	Gooding, 20 Aug 2016
17	1962 250 GT SWB California Spyder	3099 GT	$18,045,000	Gooding, 2 Mar 2023
18	2023 Daytona SP3	n/a	$17,825,000	RM Sotheby’s, Aug 2026
19	1964 250 LM	6105	$17,600,000	RM Auctions, 13 Aug 2015
20	1957 250 Testa Rossa Prototipo	0666 TR	$16,390,000	Gooding, 21 Aug 2011

The Mecum figure at number five is marked provisional deliberately. Mecum reports high bids alongside completed sales in the same format, and no premium-inclusive figure has been published. The buyer was named afterwards, which points to a completed sale, but it is not confirmed.

Two prices that are not prices

Rows four and thirteen are charity lots and should never sit unlabelled in a value table.

The 2026 Ferrari Luce, a one-off, made $40,000,000 at Monterey with the buyer’s premium waived. The 600th Daytona SP3 made $26,000,000 the year before. Both went to the same buyer, Herbert Wertheim.

A car bought partly as a donation, with the auction house forgoing its commission, tells you nothing about what that car is worth. It tells you what one person was willing to give to a cause with a Ferrari attached. Rank it against 3765 LM and you are comparing a gift to a market.

The currency trap

Three of the biggest results on this list were paid in euros.

The 335 S made €32,075,200 at Artcurial in February 2016. You will see it quoted as $35.7 million, and no one paid $35.7 million. That is a conversion at the exchange rate of the week. The 250 LM at RM Paris in 2025 has the same problem, quoted as $36.3m against an actual €34,880,000.

Convert if you like, but the euro figure is the price and the dollar figure is arithmetic. Lists that mix nominal dollars, converted euros and inflation-adjusted numbers in one column are not ranking anything.

The figure that is simply false

You will find, repeated across this topic, that a 1957 250 Testa Rossa sold for $39.8 million.

It did not. Chassis 0666 TR sold at Gooding at Pebble Beach on 21 August 2011 for $16,390,000, which was a world record at the time. The $39.8 million appears to be an inflation-adjusted or otherwise garbled number that has been passed along as a nominal sale price.

Why the GTO, and how many exist

Thirty-six 250 GTOs were built between 1962 and 1964: 33 Series I, three Series II. Four Series I cars were later rebodied to Series II specification, and those are rebodies rather than extra cars.

The count reaches 39 only if the three four-litre 330 GTO cars are included, which is not a trivial distinction here, because one of them, 3765 LM, is the auction record holder. “Thirty-six GTOs plus three four-litre cars” is the precise formulation. Bare figures of 33, 34 or 39 are wrong or unqualified.

The value comes from a combination almost nothing else has: minute production, a championship record across 1962 to 1964, eligibility for every blue-chip historic event, and near-total survival. Essentially all 36 still exist and each is individually documented by race history, originality and body series. That is why chassis numbers appear in headlines here and nowhere else in the collector market.

What I make of it

The interesting thing about this table is how little of it is a market.

The top entry is private and unverifiable. Two of the top thirteen are charity lots with waived commissions. One is provisional. Several are quoted in the wrong currency by nearly everyone who reproduces them.

Strip those out and you are left with a genuinely thin set of audited results, in which the same handful of chassis numbers rotate through the same three auction houses in front of the same bidders.

My read is that the 250 GTO market functions less like an asset class than like a register of ownership among a few dozen people who all know each other. The prices are real. Whether they would survive contact with a wider pool of buyers has never been tested, because that pool has never been invited.

For the people who can afford them, see the richest people in the world.