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

If one of today's cars has caught your eye, don't just look at the hammer price.

Importing? Check here the true landed cost.

Buying within the U.S.? Get a free shipping quote (with our tool) in under a minute. No email. No phone number. No sales calls.

We spend so much time looking at the online platforms and the established live auction houses that it is easy to think that is basically the collector-car auction market. To be fair, most of the volume and eyeballs are there, so naturally that is where we spend our time too, but every now and then a sale pops up somewhere else that makes me wonder whether the circle is starting to get a little wider.

That is exactly what happened when I started looking through Richmond Auctions’ Fall Spectacular at the Savoy Automobile Museum. Richmond is much better known for high-end advertising, petroliana and automobilia than cars, but this is no tiny experiment. They have more than 125 collector cars going across the block alongside roughly 400 pieces of automobilia, including four Kindig-built cars, TwelveAir, which won the 2024 Ridler Award, and a 2021 Liquid Carbon Ford GT with just 51 miles. Richmond Auctions

The Ford GT is what really got my attention, because there were only 30 Liquid Carbon examples produced and this one is pretty spectacular, with Shadow Black stripes, the Light Speed interior and an original sticker of $822,000. But, as usual, rather than just looking at the car I ran the VIN through Sam’s Data, and that is where it got much more interesting.

This exact GT was on Bring a Trailer in March 2025, eventually reaching $1.435 million without meeting reserve. Now the same car is sitting at Richmond and, as I write this, the bid is already $1.45 million, so Richmond has already taken it beyond the highest bid it received the last time it was on BaT, not too shabby!

I know $15,000 on a $1.4 million car is hardly something to throw a party over, and we still don’t know where Richmond’s sale ultimately ends, but that isn’t really the part I find fascinating. What I find fascinating is how Richmond has managed to get it there.

Go look at the two experiences online and they could hardly be more different. We have all become used to what an online auction listing looks like now, especially on BaT: huge photo galleries, videos, comments, seller interaction, thousands of watchers and days of people effectively picking the car apart in public. The Richmond presentation online feels much more like what it actually is, which is an online window into a traditional live auction. Richmond itself describes these premier events as live sales with in-person, online, phone and absentee bidding, backed by printed catalogs and months of marketing beforehand.

And I actually love that, because it makes the result so far even more interesting.

This doesn’t look like Richmond is trying to build another BaT and beat them at the online-auction game. They don’t have anything close to BaT’s internet audience and, frankly, they don’t seem to need it. BaT gets somewhere around 12 million visits a month depending on the source, while the estimates I have seen for Richmond are around 10,000. For perspective, that isn’t 1% of BaT’s traffic, it is actually well under one-tenth of 1%. One current traffic estimate puts BaT at about 10.3 million monthly visits.

Yet Richmond has the car, and Richmond already has a $1.45 million bid.

That tells me something much more important than website traffic. They must be building a pretty stellar reputation with collectors, and they must be doing a very good job of marketing these sales directly to the people who actually matter. You don’t accidentally convince somebody to consign one of 30 Liquid Carbon Ford GTs, and you certainly don’t accidentally find people prepared to bid nearly $1.5 million for it.

Richmond already has some evidence that this is working. Their first major automobile sale in 2025, the Tony Townley Collection, generated more than $25 million and Richmond says it achieved a 99.8% sell-through rate. The company itself has also surpassed $100 million in gross auction sales in less than four years, largely from the collectibles categories where it first made its name. So perhaps I’m late to the party here, because clearly the collectors writing big checks already know who Richmond are.

What I think we sometimes forget in the online-auction world is that traffic and buyers are two completely different things.(remember SuperCar Blondie’s auction site)

12 million people can visit your website, but you don’t need 12 million people to sell a $1.5 million Ford GT. You probably need five genuinely qualified people to know it exists, and then you really need two of them to badly want it.

Richmond seems to understand that.

There is another reason this week becomes a particularly good one to watch, because BaT currently has another Liquid Carbon Ford GT running at the same time and ending at the same time, a coincidence??

That one is a 2022 with just 17 miles and, before coming to BaT, had been publicly advertised by Motor Cars of Chicago at roughly $2.2 million, so we know what the seller is looking for. So within a few days we are going to get two of just 30 Liquid Carbon GTs tested in two completely different environments.

I don’t want to turn this into some fake Richmond versus BaT boxing match because it really isn’t one. The cars aren’t identical, the sellers are different, the reserves could be completely different and there are a million other things that can affect where each car finishes. We certainly won’t be able to look at the final prices and declare that one auction house is better than the other.

But I do think there is a bigger point hiding in here.

We talk all the time about the size of a platform, its audience, its number of registered bidders and how many people view a listing, and obviously all of those things matter. What Richmond is reminding me is that there is another model. Build a name with serious collectors, earn their trust, get the right consignments, market those consignments incredibly well and make sure the handful of people who can actually buy them know where to be.

In some ways that is the old auction-house model rather than the new online one, but Richmond appears to be combining the two. They have online bidding and an app, but the center of gravity is still a proper live event at the Savoy Automobile Museum, with people in the room, phone bidders, a printed catalog and a much broader event built around the cars.

That may also explain why they can compete for a car like this without having anything remotely resembling BaT’s traffic. The seller isn’t simply buying a listing page and hoping enough people happen to see it. Richmond is effectively saying, give us the car and we will go find the people.

If they can keep doing that, sellers are going to notice.

And this is where I think the online auction market is becoming more interesting. The ever-growing online and the established live houses aren’t going anywhere, nor should they, but we are starting to see other names getting cars that previously might have automatically gone to the usual places. Richmond is doing it, Dutch Auctions is trying a completely different auction format, and there are other smaller and specialist houses quietly building their own audiences.

You don’t necessarily need to become the next BaT to matter. You might just need to become the place where a certain group of sellers believes you can get their car in front of the right buyers.

Richmond already managed to get this Ford GT, which says plenty by itself. The fact that it has already surpassed the $1.435 million high bid the exact same car received on BaT makes me think they are doing something exceptionally well behind the scenes.

I’ll be watching what happens when the hammer actually falls, but regardless of where this GT finishes, Richmond Auctions has definitely earned a place on my list of auction houses to start paying a lot more attention to.

Enjoying The Daily Vroom?

Pay it forward by sharing this newsletter with an automotive aficionado in your circles. Your endorsement allows us to accelerate our growth.