$26m Ferrari Daytona SP3 Is Most Expensive Post-2000 Car Ever Sold At Auction

Costing roughly £1.7 million when new, the Ferrari Daytona SP3 was not what anyone would ever call a cheap car. The extra 600th chassis built by Ferrari for a special charity auction, though, has just made those original 599 examples look like Kia Picantos by comparison, because at its sale at Monterey Car Week over the weekend, it went for a staggering $26 million.

That’s about £19.2 million, or around 11 times what a ‘standard’ Daytona would have cost new. Put another way, it’s the 13th-most expensive car to ever publicly sell at auction, and comfortably the most expensive built this millennium, handily smashing the $18.8 million hammer price of a 2013 Mercedes F1 car back in 2023.

What makes all this particularly staggering is that, besides its special livery crafted by Ferrari’s Tailor Made division and its new interior trim made from recycled tyres, there was very little to set this car apart from a regular Daytona SP3.

Granted, with an 829bhp, naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 sitting amidships – quite possibly the last time such an engine will be found in a mid-engined Ferrari – the SP3’s already quite a special thing. Inevitably, for a limited-run Ferrari, values already seem to be going up on them too – as we write this, there’s one listed for sale in the UK for £4.95 million.

The astonishing hammer price for what Ferrari calls ‘Chassis 599+1’, though, seems to have largely been driven by sheer goodwill. All the proceeds from the car are to be donated to The Ferrari Foundation, a charity dedicated to supporting educational initiatives. Its recent work has included helping fund the rebuild of a school destroyed by the Californian wildfires earlier this year.

It’s a bit of an unprecedented price for a post-2000 road car – indeed, the next-most valuable 21st century car that wasn’t a significant F1 machine was the one-off Bugatti Chiron Profilee, which sold for ‘just’ $10.6 million a few years ago. Will it open the floodgates for more modern machinery to start mixing it with the usual 1950s and ’60s fare in the very highest echelons of car auctions?