💰 The figures shared below don’t count any other sales such as car seats, memorabilia etc… All online auction sites are analyzed to put this leaderboard together.

We’re back to our 4 trusted platforms filling out the market leaderboard, no-one else managed the 5 sales yesterday.

Want to dive deeper into any of these listings? Just click on the car to take you directly to the listing.

I know this auction ended last week, but I wanted to give it a little time before writing about it. The obvious story was that a 1985 Ferrari 288 GTO sold for $6,825,000 and became the most expensive car ever sold on Bring a Trailer, but the more I went back through the listing and the comments, the more I realized just how crazy this one auction really was.

It has now been viewed more than 330,000 times, attracted almost 7,500 watchers and ended with close to 1,000 comments.

This was also BaT’s 250,000th auction, and they clearly wanted to mark the occasion properly. I cannot wait to see what they have planned for number 300,000, no pressure!

A 288 GTO was about as good a choice as they could have made. Only 272 were built, it was the starting point for the line of Ferrari halo cars that followed, and there are plenty of people who would take one over an F40, F50, Enzo or LaFerrari without needing much time to think about it.

The strange thing is that for all the attention, the final few minutes were not really the bidding war everyone expected.

The car had already reached $6.75 million several days before the auction ended, which is obviously very serious territory. Even so, when a car like this is closing, you still expect someone to arrive at the end with a proper knockout bid. Not another $5,000 or $10,000, but at least six figures to make it clear they are there to buy the car.

Instead, a new bidder appeared with around two minutes remaining and added just $25,000 to the existing $6.8 million bid. Nobody answered, and the car was his.

After two weeks of buildup, hundreds of comments and what felt like the whole internet waiting for fireworks, one bid at $6,825,000 was enough to win the most expensive car ever sold on BaT.

The winning bidder, Rupersburg, may have been new to this particular auction, but he is clearly not new to buying serious Ferraris. Just a few weeks earlier, the same account bought David Lee’s V8 powered 1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GTS “Evo 3.6” for more than $1 million.

That car was hardly the obvious choice for someone simply looking to add a Dino to the garage. It was a heavily reworked, very personal interpretation of one, and following it with a 288 GTO suggests this is someone who knows exactly what he likes and is putting together a pretty interesting Ferrari collection.

As for the price, this was a BaT record, but it was not a world record for a 288 GTO. Other examples have sold for more, including some very low mileage and highly original cars that reached much bigger numbers once auction house fees were included.

This particular car was never going to be judged in quite the same way. It had around 14k miles, had been painted silver by its first owner before eventually being returned to its original Rosso Corsa, had passed through several countries and collections, and even spent time impounded in the Netherlands because of accusations involving one of its previous owners.

It later returned to Ferrari in Maranello for a major refurbishment, reportedly including an engine overhaul, and came with Ferrari Classiche certification, a Marcel Massini report and confirmation that the major mechanical components were consistent with the originals.

Basically, it had lived a life. For certain Ferrari collectors, any repaint, engine work or complicated ownership history will stop a car from ever reaching the absolute top of the market. They want the lowest mileage, most original and least disturbed example they can find.

This was not that car, but I am not sure that is necessarily a bad thing.

It was a properly documented 288 GTO with a fascinating history, recent servicing and enough mileage that the new owner might actually be willing to drive it. At nearly $7 million, I appreciate that calling anything usable sounds slightly ridiculous, but compared with a delivery mileage example where every additional mile feels like wiping value off the car, this may be the one you can enjoy without having a calculator running in your head the entire time.

That is why I think the final price probably worked for both sides. It was a huge result for the seller and a new record for BaT, but the buyer did not have to pay the sort of money recently achieved by the very best, untouched examples.

We all know 1600Veloce by now, so there is no need to go overboard talking about his experience or act surprised that he knew how to run the auction. BaT trusted him with its 250,000th auction because it knew he would deliver, and boy he did.

There were hundreds of photographs, historical documents, period images and more videos than most sellers would produce across several listings. The car was shown starting, driving, shifting and moving properly on the road rather than simply sitting in a showroom looking expensive.

New material kept appearing throughout the auction, including on the final morning, and the seller remained involved in the comments answering questions and keeping people engaged. When everyone started worrying that the reserve might not be met, he eventually made it very clear that the car was going to sell.

BaT gave him the stage, and he made sure the auction felt worthy of the occasion.

The comments became almost as entertaining as the car. There were owners sharing what a 288 GTO was actually like to drive, people remembering seeing them when they were new, detailed discussions about originality and Ferrari history, and hundreds of people admitting that commenting on the auction was probably as close as they were ever going to get to owning one.

BaT eventually had to slow down the comments during the final minutes because so many were being posted.

That is what BaT does better than anyone else. A traditional auction house might give a car ten minutes under the lights in a packed room. This car spent two weeks being discussed, analysed and watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The listing kept growing, the audience became part of the story and by the final day it felt like everyone had some sort of interest in how it ended, even if only a handful had any chance of buying it.

I do not think this means every multimillion dollar car should now be sold online. Traditional auction houses still have deep relationships with collectors, private clients around the world and access to bidders who may never publicly appear in an online auction.

But after this, nobody can seriously argue that BaT or indeed other online auction platforms can not sell these high end cars, the audience is there for sellers.

Then there is the fee. BaT’s buyer fee was capped at just $7,500, which as I’m writing this is laughable compared to what you’d have to pay at a non-online auction.

Had the buyer paid an 8% premium at a physical auction house, that would have added another $546,000 to the price. At 10%, it would have been $682,500. That is before considering any fees the seller might also have been paying on the other side.

Of course, you cannot simply assume the hammer price would have been identical somewhere else, but the difference is still staggering. The winning bidder paid $6,825,000 for the car and just $7,500 to BaT.

For an auction with more than 330,000 views, nearly 1,000 comments and a new platform record, that might be the craziest number of the entire sale.

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