Rare Ferrari sells for $35 million, assumes most expensive car record

A 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO made for race driver Stirling Moss and one of 39 of the rare vehicles manufactured during its three-year run, has become the world’s most expensive car. It sold in a private transaction in May for $35 million.

Bloomberg News reports the apple-green Ferrari is listed among May’s high-end sales on the classic car dealers website, anamera.com. The sale was confirmed, according to Bloomberg, by two sources.

The car was sold by the Dutch-born businessman Eric Heerema, owner of the Nyetimber vineyard in Sussex, southern England. American collector Craig McCaw is the new owner. Neither seller nor buyer could be reached for comment.

The green GTO was acquired by Heerema a decade ago for about $8.5 million from the Japanese collector Yoshiho Matsuda, who was also the previous owner of Evans’s Ferrari, dealers said.

Matsuda acquired the ex-Moss racer in 1999 from Talacrest, who bought the car for $3.5 million in 1996.

A Ferrari 250 GTO bought by U.K. television and radio host Chris Evans for about $18 million in 2010 has been sold for a million-dollar price “in the high 20s,” dealers said.
The 250 GTO, created in 1962 to compete at the Le Mans 24- Hour and other Grand-Touring car races, is regarded by collectors as the most desirable of all classic Ferraris. Motor Trend Classic magazine placed the 250 GTO first on a list of the “Greatest Ferraris of all time” in 2010.

Heerema’s example, with a chassis numbered 3505, was made by the Ferrari factory in 1962 for the U.K. racer Moss, whose name is scrawled on the back of the right-hand driver’s seat.

The car was painted in the pale-green livery of Moss’s UDT- Laystall race team. Moss suffered a career-ending crash at the Goodwood circuit in Sussex on April 23, 1962, in a race just prior to taking the wheel of his new Ferrari.

The previous highest price paid for a car was an undisclosed amount between $30-34 million by Petter Mullin for a 1936 Type 57SC Bugatti Atlantic, bought in 2010 by the California-based collector Peter Mullin in another private transaction.