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The 1964 racer's record result helped push Gooding Christie's Pebble Beach sale past $159 million, the auction house's biggest total ever.
Monterey Car Week just delivered another blockbuster for the collector car market. At Gooding Christie's 22nd annual Pebble Beach Auctions, held August 14-15 on the Monterey Peninsula, bidders combined to spend more than $159 million, making it the auction house's biggest sale in its history and the standout result of the entire week.
The star of the weekend was a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe once campaigned by Carroll Shelby himself. Bidders pushed the coupe to an all-in price of $42,905,000, instantly making it the most valuable car Gooding Christie's has ever sold and the most expensive American-built car ever to cross an auction block. The sale beat the previous American record, the ex-Gary Cooper 1935 Duesenberg SSJ that Gooding sold for $22 million back in 2018, by more than $20 million. For a deeper look at how the Daytona Coupe's shape lives on today, Motorious previously covered a street-legal Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe continuation car built around the original CSX2000 chassis.
The Daytona Coupe's result also toppled the auction house's own year-old benchmark. At last year's Pebble Beach sale, Gooding Christie's set a $25.3 million record with a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider Competizione, a figure that stood as the firm's high-water mark for barely twelve months before the Shelby blew past it.
The Cobra wasn't the only seven or eight-figure result of the weekend. A 1963 Ferrari 250 P brought $18,705,000, a new record for the model, while a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB Berlinetta Competizione added $8,090,000. Further down the order, a 1952 Ferrari 225 Sport 'Tuboscocca' Spider and a 1959 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage each cleared roughly $4.2 to $4.3 million, and modern machinery held its own too, with a 2020 Bugatti Chiron Sport 'Edition Noire' fetching $3,442,500 and a Singer-reimagined 1989 Porsche 911 Turbo bringing $1,902,500. Two single-owner collections, from Brian Brunkhorst and the Mullin family, also contributed strong results across a broad range of prewar and postwar metal.
Across the two-day sale, 158 lots found buyers for a 94 percent sell-through rate, with 28 lots crossing the $1 million mark and an average price per lot of $1,005,681, up 19 percent from 2025. Gooding Christie's President David Gooding called it "our strongest auction ever," pointing to the firm's steady year-over-year growth as proof that top-tier collector cars continue to find deep-pocketed buyers.
The Daytona Coupe's record capped a week in which multiple auction houses posted strong numbers around Pebble Beach. Motorious also reported on Broad Arrow's inaugural Quail auction, which delivered $97.4 million and nine world records days earlier, and on a 1924 Hispano-Suiza 'Torpedo' that took Best in Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance as the broader Car Week crowd descended on the Monterey Peninsula. Gooding Christie's own docket that weekend ranged from million-dollar racing icons all the way down to more attainable classics, including a low-mile 1993 Toyota Land Cruiser VX Limited that crossed the block without reserve.
Gooding Christie's isn't slowing down. The auction house is set to debut its first New York sale as the official auction house of Retromobile New York, running November 19-22 at the Javits Center, before returning to Paris in early 2027 for its annual Retromobile auction.
