Just over a week ago RM smashed their own world record for a British car sold at auction when they managed to flog this old shed:
The 1956 Le-Mans winning Jaguar D-Type XKD 501 sold for a premium inclusive $21.78 million (£16.64 million), blitzing the amount paid for their lowly Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato last December by almost $7.5 million. In front of a packed saleroom at the Portola Hotel & Spa in Monterey (where?!), the Canadian auction house brought the hammer down after a tense 15-minute bidding war between four different collectors.. Which is what auctions are all about after all…
As is often the case with cars like this, the financial history is fascinating. Bought originally from Ecurie Ecosse financier Major John Peebles by a young aristocrat called Sir Michael Nairn in 1970, the price paid (£10,000, or about £150,000 in today’s money) was considered somewhat profligate by young Sir Michael’s stuffy relatives, considering this an awful lot of money to fritter on a ‘silly old car’. Well, would you pay £150,000 for the Audi LMP900 that won Le Mans in 2001? A 15 year old race car that’s neither useable nor yet ‘classic’?
What’s important of course is that Sir Michael had the last laugh when he sold the D-Type on to a well known American collector in 1999 for a cool £1 million – a 100 fold return on his investment over 30 years, and the equivalent of £12.5 million today – so definitely two fingers up to the oldies there.
This week’s headline – ‘Car bought for a million sells for 16 times that’ sounds impressive until you drill down to that £12.5 million equivalent figure in 1999 – so clear profit on the car after inflation is a measly £4 million – hardly worth getting out of bed for really..
Of course the other way to look at it is that our American collector, as well as enjoying untold pleasure from owning one of the greatest cars ever created for the last decade and a half, has been banking a million a year whilst he’s been at it.
Sadly I’m not sure Audi will be up for selling their Le Mans winning LMP900 now, and anyway, all things considered it is undoubtedly a silly car.
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