The Holy Grail Cars? Get Them While They Last.
The news shocked the collector-car world. In May 2022, a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé — named for its creator, the company’s chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut — sold for 135 million euros, (about $143 million). That was more than double the previous record of $70 million set by a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO in 2018.
Perhaps even more surprising is that a car built in the mid-1990s, a McLaren F1, sold in 2021 for over $20 million. Sales in the tens of millions of dollars are rare in the collector-car market, but then these three cars represent what high-end collectors call “holy grail” cars, so named because they are the most sought after in the vintage-car world.
Before the McLaren F1 sold, the most fertile era for the priciest postwar collector cars was the 10 years from the early 1950s and the early 1960s, which included that Mercedes and Ferrari, and rivals like the Jaguar XKSS (the actor Steve McQueen owned one), with an example selling in 2023 for $13.2 million.
The McLaren F1, which was produced in the 1990s, is a modern car and clearly an outlier, and in the quarter century since it went out of production, no other road legal car of equal appeal to collectors has emerged. Given the seemingly finite life of the internal combustion engine, the McLaren may be the last of the holy grail cars.
Cars capable of selling for eight and nine figures have several things in common, some are obvious even to noncar people, and some are slightly more nuanced. Rarity is a major factor. The Mercedes was one of just two built; Ferrari produced two series of 250 GTOs that totaled 36 cars; only 16 of the Jaguar XKSS were built before a fire at the factory ended production; and in the case of the McLaren, 106 were built.
