It didn’t finish the race, but it’s a champion today.
A Ford GT40 Mk II that competed in the historic 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans has been auctioned for $13,205,000 at the RM Sotheby’s event in Miami, the highest auction price ever paid for the model or a Ford.
The car was entered in the famous Ford v Ferrari race by Holman-Moody with drivers Mark Donohue and Paul Hawkins, but only completed 12 laps before it was sidelined by a differential failure.
Donohue scored a second-place finish in the 1966 12 Hours of Sebring with the 427-cubic-inch V8-powered car and was donated to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in 1968, where it has resided ever since.
The museum put it through a full restoration in 2011 and offered it for auction along with several other milestone cars that hadn’t competed at Indianapolis to help set up an endowment to support the facility, which has recently been renovated.
The previous record sale for a GT40 was the $11 million paid for a 1968 example that was used as a camera car during the making of the Steve McQueen film “Le Mans.”
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The second place car driven by Ken Miles and Denis Hulme that was scored a contentious second place and was the subject of the film “Ford v Ferrari” resides in the Shelby American Collection in Boulder, Colorado.
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As for the car that won the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans to mark the first time an American brand took the checkered flag, it was privately sold a decade ago to Rob Kauffman, owner of Charlotte, N.C., classic car dealer RK Motors, for an undisclosed amount.