(New York) A 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO was sold Monday evening in New York for $51.7 million, the second most expensive collector’s car ever sold at auction, Sotheby’s announced.

Owned by an American collector for 38 years, the example of this legendary Italian sports car beat another 250 GTO sold in 2018, at Sotheby’s, for $48 million.

But the Ferrari made far less than the all-time record for a car at auction: a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sold for €135 million in 2022.

One of only two examples of this Mercedes sports car – sold at a confidential auction in May 2022 at the German manufacturer’s museum in Stuttgart – “was the most expensive car ever sold” in the world, whether auction or private sales, a spokesperson for RM Sotheby’s, the luxury automobile subsidiary of the auction house, told AFP.

The 250 GTO left Monday evening after a few minutes of bidding in the room, but at a price lower than the “more than $60 million” that RM Sotheby’s was expecting.

Dating from 1962, this legendary Scuderia sports car – chassis numbered 3765, four-liter engine developing 390 horsepower – finished in second place in a 1000 km endurance race on the circuit. race at the Nürburgring as well as the legendary 24 hours of Le Mans, where the team had to withdraw due to engine failure, according to RM Sotheby’s.

After a few years of racing in Sicily, Italy, the car was sold and exported to the United States in the late 1960s.

Restored and modified, this 250 GTO changed American owners several times before ending up in the hands of a collector from Ohio in 1985, who sold it on Monday.

The New York auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, are wrapping up their fall season of sales of works of art that have not experienced the crisis this week, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The market is driven by China and Asia and shows no sign of slowing down, according to Sotheby’s despite a tense international context.

“Whatever happens on the financial markets, a car of this caliber is a collector’s item, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a collector,” Michael Caimano of RM Sotheby’s told AFP before the sale. comparing the Ferrari to a work of art that you “can touch, smell and hear.”