The Most Expensive McLaren F1 Is No Garage Queen
In August 2026, a McLaren crossed the block at RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale and set a new public auction record for any British-built car at a staggering $34,655,000.
A price like that usually belongs to a car nobody drives. Most seven-figure classics get locked away, wrapped up, and wheeled out for a concours lawn once a year.
This particular one has been crashed twice, restored twice, driven on 466-mile road rallies, and spun off a racetrack in front of a Goodwood crowd. But its owners kept using it, and the value kept climbing anyway.
Nothing Naturally Aspirated Has Ever Gone Faster
The F1 had no turbos, no traction control, and as little weight as Gordon Murray could engineer out of it, with the driver seated in the center and a passenger on each side. Behind him sat a 6.1-liter BMW S70/2 V12 making 618 horsepower and 479 lb-ft.
On March 31, 1998, Andy Wallace took the XP5 prototype to Ehra-Lessien in Germany with the rev limiter wound out to 8,300 rpm. He recorded a two-way average of 240.1 mph, with a one-way peak of 243 mph. No other production car went faster until the Koenigsegg CCR and the Bugatti Veyron arrived in 2005.
Nearly three decades later, no naturally aspirated production car has beaten that record.
The F1 GTR then won the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright on its debut in 1995, leading a 1-3-4-5 finish. Murray later said winning Le Mans at the first attempt was harder than taking back-to-back Formula 1 championships.
McLaren built 106 F1s in total, only 64 of them to road specification. That scarcity has pushed values into eight figures, and cars worth that much usually stop being cars. Owners park them, insure them, and wait.
But McLaren F1 owners never got that memo. They drive them, crash them, fix them, and drive them again, and the market keeps rewarding them for it.
Chassis 10R Is The Most Expensive McLaren Ever Sold At Auction
Chassis 10R, a 1996 McLaren F1 GTR known as the Pop Art F1, sold for $34,655,000 at RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale in August 2026, against an estimate in excess of $35 million. That made it the most expensive McLaren and the most expensive British-built car ever sold at public auction.
It is the only F1 GTR to wear a bespoke factory livery, a scarlet and yellow scheme with bold “96 GTR” graphics down the flanks. RM Sotheby’s calls it the most recognizable of all McLaren F1s, and that is hard to argue with.
10R left Woking in December 1995 as the first of nine cars built to 1996 specification. It is one of only two short-tail prototypes McLaren kept for itself, the other being 01R, the car that won Le Mans in 1995.
The 1996 cars got extended bodywork front and rear, a more aggressive splitter, and a magnesium gearbox housing that helped shave around 84 lbs off the previous season’s Le Mans winner. RM Sotheby’s rates the result as the fastest F1 GTR of all, quicker even than the 1997 Long Tail.
For all that, 10R never won a race. It did winter testing at Magny-Cours with JJ Lehto, a 12-hour test program in April 1996, then Le Mans pre-qualifying with David Brabham, where it placed 8th in class and 20th overall. Sister car 11R contested the race itself.
McLaren converted 10R for the road and registered it as K40 MCL before selling it directly to Nick Mason of Pink Floyd in 1999. He kept it for 25 years and used it, including two 466-mile road rallies.
A journalist lost control of the car and ended up in a wheat field, which led to a full restoration by Dean Lanzante in 2009. Mason then went off during a GT1 demonstration at the 75th Goodwood Members’ Meeting in 2017 and hit a tire wall, and Lanzante rebuilt it again.
The car went back to Lanzante after every serious drive on what RM Sotheby’s describes as an open-checkbook policy, leaving it one of the best-maintained F1s in existence. Damage, properly documented and properly fixed, turned out to be part of the appeal.
10R never won a race, yet it pulled $34.6 million. That only raises the question of how much the race-winning 11R chassis might be worth today.
The Brunei McLaren With 13,000 Miles Was Sent Back To Woking
Chassis 014 sold for $25,317,500 at RM Sotheby’s inaugural Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week auction on December 5, 2025. It remains the highest public auction result for a road-specification McLaren F1.
It is the 14th of the 64 road cars, delivered new to the Brunei Royal Family in Titanium Yellow over black. It went to the UK, then to the United States.
A new long-term owner bought it in August 2006 with 3,224 miles showing. Rather than park it, he sent it back to McLaren in Woking for a complete rebuild the following year.
The car came back in Ibis White with the High-Downforce Kit, which swapped the active wing for a fixed rear spoiler and added a GTR-derived front bumper, splitter, and LM-spec louvres. The interior was converted to LM specification with a race-style driver’s seat and more exposed carbon. The bill came to more than $500,000, and 014 was the last of only eight F1s to get the kit.
Michael Schumacher signed the door sill on March 12, 1996, two days after retiring from his first race with Ferrari at the Australian GP. After the 2007 repaint, Lewis Hamilton signed the left luggage compartment during his rookie season, and that autograph is still on the car.
Then the owner drove it on both coasts until the odometer approached 12,000 miles. That brought an engine-out service by McLaren Philadelphia in 2018, a new fuel cell, and over $50,000 in maintenance. It later moved to Denmark and crossed the block showing 13,711 miles.
By comparison, Chassis 029, a 242-mile Creighton Brown time capsule, sold for $20,465,000 in 2021. Roughly 13,500 extra miles were worth about $5 million more.
Mr. Bean Crashed His McLaren F1 Twice And Still Made Millions
Rowan Atkinson bought chassis 061 in 1997, reportedly for £640,000, or around $1 million at the time. Best known for his portrayal as the comedic character Mr. Bean, Atkinson is said to have covered close to 40,000 miles in it, which for an F1 is a remarkable number.
The first crash came in 1999, when he ran into the back of a Rover Metro and damaged the hood. The second, in August 2011, was far worse. He lost control on the A605 near Peterborough, hit a tree and a road sign, and suffered a shoulder injury as the car caught fire.
Repairs came to £910,000, around $1.4 million, reported as the largest car insurance payout in British history. That was roughly 42% more than he had paid for the car.
He took it back and kept driving it until 2015, when he sold it through dealer Taylor & Crawley for a reported £8 million, about $12.2 million, clearing well over $10 million in profit after crashing it twice.
Jay Leno Drives His F1 Once A Month
Jay Leno’s example is chassis 015, a black car with a red stripe that he bought secondhand in 1998 for a reported $800,000. It had previously belonged to Dutch racing driver Ben Pon Jr.
By March 2024, the odometer had passed 12,000 miles, and a detailing episode on his own channel showed the swirls and chips that come with using a car. Leno says the F1 still gets driven at least once a month.
He has also turned down a reported $20 million offer, explaining that he bought it as an engineering piece rather than an investment. Covering something up and hoping the neighbor pays more, he said, is what people do with paintings.
Why Driven McLaren F1s Are Now Worth More, But Not Other McLarens
The record holder has been wrecked twice and rallied across Tuscany. The road car record holder shows 13,711 miles. The tidy 242-mile time capsule sits about $5 million below it.
With only 64 road cars built, buyers now pay for history they can read and recount rather than an odometer they can admire. A car sent back to Lanzante to maintain and restore meticulously is a known quantity in a way an untouched one never is.
Only two McLarens since have gone up at all. The P1 launched at around $1.15 million and now averages $1,704,570 in tracked sales, with one P1 HDK making $3,575,000 in August 2026. The Senna started near $1 million and averages $1,264,210, with recent results of $1,870,000 at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale in January 2026 and $1,760,000 at Mecum Indy in May.
Both are healthy numbers, but neither is in the same conversation as a car Jay Leno bought for $800,000 that now trades at 30 times that.
Those gains also follow low delivery mileage and untouched paint, which is the exact opposite of what just happened at Monterey. Everything below McLaren’s Ultimate Series behaves like a normal supercar. The 570S has shed roughly 30% of its sticker price and now sits around $130,000, while the 650S is down closer to 45% over six years.
Gordon Murray described 10R’s next owner as a custodian rather than an investor. The F1 remains the only McLaren where those two roles have never been in conflict, and the only one where driving it hard has cost its owners nothing, in fact made them money instead.
Sources: RM Sotheby’s, Jay Leno’s Garage, Mecum, McLaren
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