McLaren F1 #029 SELLS for £14,766,000 at Pebble Beach auction

A 1995 McLaren F1 – chassis #029 with just 240 miles from new – sells at Gooding’s Pebble Beach auction for £14,766,213.

When the McLaren F1 arrived back in the 1990s it cost a whopping £640,000, but McLaren struggled to sell the world’s fastest and most expensive car, eventually stopping at just 64 regular road cars and reputedly flogging the last one for a bit over £400k.

But inexorably in the years since its launch, the McLaren F1 has risen in value, from somewhere around £2 million back in 2009 (and an exceptional £2.5 million for the McLaren show car from its Park Lane showroom) to what now seems to be a record (in Dollar terms) of $20,465,000 for chassis #029.

With just 240 miles from new, spending much of its life in Japan and, despite ending up in the US, still hardly turning a wheel in its 26-year life, F1 chassis #029 is a time-capsule car, coming in Creighton Brown (which looks better than it sounds) complete with all its original goodies like Facom tool chest and Tag watch.

The hammer price at Gooding’s Pebble Beach sale – which includes the unavoidable auction fees – was a whopping $20,465,000, which equates to £14,766,213 and is a record.

But, regular readers may ask, didn’t a McLaren F1, chassis #018, sell for £16.3 million back in £2019? Well, yes it did, but that car was just one of two converted by McLaren to LM spec, and due to the Pound’s weakness against the Dollar at the time it sold, in UK terms, for more than this F1. But in Dollar terms, chassis #029 becomes the most expensive ‘regular’ F1 to sell in auction.

It would seem, despite the trials and tribulations of recent times, there’s still plenty of money around to drop some £15 million on a McLaren F1.