Before heading to Italy for its Ferrari 70th anniversary sale, RM Sotheby’s staged its 11th annual collector car auction in London’s Battersea Evolution, where a unique blue 2004 Ferrari Enzo sold for £1,805,000 ($2.36 million).
Overall, the London auction generated £7,064,475 ($9,254,465) in transactions. Prices reported include buyer’s fees.
The auction-leading Enzo originally was delivered in another unique color — Matt Titanio Extra Campionario with a Pelle Cuoio interior (and, yes, those are the names of the original colors) — to a member of a Middle Eastern royal family living in London. It was purchased by an Asian mining magnate in 2008 at RM’s Leggenda e Passione sale at the Ferrari factory in Italy and was repainted in its Blu Tour de France color.
It was sold this past week showing 8,884 kilometers on its odometer.
Second-highest sale of the auction was a 1955 Bentley R-Type Continental fastback formerly owned by Victor Gauntlett, who at the time was chairman and primary financial supporter of Aston Martin despite being a Bentley collector and driver. The consignor’s family bought the car from Gauntlett and has owned it for nearly 35 years. It sold this week for £826,250 ($1.082 million).
Important Porsches continued to do well at auction with a one-owner 1996 Porsche 911 GT2 selling for £775,625 ($1.016 million). The car was one of only 161 road-legal GT2 from the final generation of air-cooled 911s and had been driven only 18,000 kilometers. Among those kilometers were laps around the Nurburgring in 1999 during which the car sustained front and rear body damage; the car was sent to Porsche in Stuttgart for repair to as-new condition, RM Sotheby’s reported.
A car with 007 movie provenance on the auction docket sold for £230,000 ($301,300), a 2014 Land Rover Defender, one of 10 modified for the film, was used in the James Bond movie, Spectre.
Another car sold with celebrity history was a 1971 Porsche 911 E delivered new to racing driver John Fitzpatrick, former British Touring Car champion who at the time was driving for the Kremer Porsche team, winning the European GT championship in 1972 and 1974. Fitzpatrick owned the car for two years, but had a reunion with the car at the auction, driving it onto the stage for bidding, where it sold for £126,500 ($165,715).
Top 5 sales — RM Sotheby’s London auction 2017:
1 .2004 Ferrari Enzo, $2.36 million
2. 1955 Bentley R-Type Continental, $1.082 million
3. 1996 Porsche 911 GT2, $1.016 million)
4. 2012 Lexus LFA, $404,465
5. 1998 Porsche 911 Turbo S, $389,725
(Prices include buyer’s fees).
