The 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti Brought $51,705,000

$51,705,000 — auction total, buyer's premium included. RM Sotheby's, standalone sale at Sotheby's New York, 13 November 2023, during Sotheby's Marquee Week sales of Modern and Contemporary Art. The car: the 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti, chassis 3765 LM.

Hammer / premium split: reporting of the sale puts the hammer at $47,000,000, making the premium $4,705,000 by arithmetic. The $51,705,000 total is RM Sotheby's published figure.

The pre-sale estimate was reported as "in excess of $60 million." The car sold below it — bidding opened at $34 million and the hammer fell in under ten minutes. A below-estimate result at $51.7 million is part of the record.

Record language — dated only: RM Sotheby's described the result in November 2023 as the most valuable Ferrari ever sold at auction, and the second-highest price for a car at auction at that date, behind the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé ($143 million, May 2022 — a different sale). Rankings have since moved — a Mercedes-Benz W196 R made €51,155,000 in February 2025.

The exact object

The 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti, chassis 3765 LM, is not interchangeable with another 250 GTO, and the lot page's own history is the reason.

It is, per RM Sotheby's, the only Works GTO example originally equipped with a 4-litre engine, and the only Tipo 1962 GTO campaigned by the Scuderia Ferrari itself. The 4-litre class existed because Le Mans and other endurance venues adopted one for 1962; Ferrari answered by putting a near-4-litre Colombo-architecture engine — dry-sump, special carburettors and camshafts — into a GTO. One of 34 examples built with Tipo 1962 coachwork; sequentially the 14th by the lot page's count.

The factory racing history, as the lot page records it: debuted for the Scuderia Ferrari at the Nürburgring 1000 KM, 27 May 1962, race number 120, driven by Mike Parkes and Willy Mairesse — class win, 2nd overall. Then Le Mans, June 1962: a second, six-carburettor 4-litre engine (about 390 hp on the lot page's estimate), Parkes and Lorenzo Bandini driving, 4th on the grid after Parkes set the day's second-fastest qualifying lap. Parkes slid into the Mulsanne sand bank on the opening laps, dug the car out over roughly 30 minutes, and the car retired with overheating after 56 laps — the sand, the lot page suggests, had blocked the radiator. The retirement stands in the record alongside the class win.

After the 4-litre season ended, Pietro Ferraro bought the car in November 1962, and in May 1963 the factory converted it to 250 GTO specifications, fitting its third engine — the 3-litre unit, internal number 670/62E, still fitted today — with John Surtees test-driving the converted car at Modena. Ferdinando Latteri then campaigned it in Sicily: three overall hillclimb wins in 1965 and runner-up in the 1965 Sicilian Hillclimb Championship. Documentation is concrete: factory build sheets for the Nürburgring and Le Mans preparations, and a third spec sheet for the 1963 conversion.

The ownership line the money rests on: after Fred Leydorf (1974–1985), the car sold in April 1985 to an Ohio-based collector — named in Sotheby's sale reporting as Jim Jaeger — who kept it for 38 years. RM Sotheby's offered it as publicly offered for the first time in those 38 years. In that tenure it was restored by Shelton Ferrari, took 2nd among 23 GTOs in the Pebble Beach GTO class in 2011, and won Best of Show at Amelia Island in 2012.

The premium, explained concretely

What $51,705,000 bought, itemised from the lot record rather than from adjectives: the only 4-litre-origin, factory-campaigned example of the most documented racing Ferrari line; an in-period class win at the Nürburgring and a Le Mans start for the works team; a factory conversion with its paperwork, and the 1963 engine still in the car; a concours record capped by an Amelia Island Best of Show against 12 sister cars; and 38 years of single ownership with, in RM Sotheby's words, diligent and fastidious upkeep — which means the car arrived at auction as a known quantity, not a rediscovery with gaps to price in.

Two honest limits belong in the same section. The result came in below the "in excess of $60 million" estimate — the room valued the car highly and still stopped well short of the ask implicit in the estimate. And the premium is chassis-specific: it prices 3765 LM's history, not "a 250 GTO" in general, as the separate benchmark below shows.

The ordinary counterpart

There is no ordinary version of this car, so the comparison runs on two benchmarks, kept separate because they answer different questions.

Benchmark one — another verified GTO transaction. The 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, chassis 3413 GT, sold at RM Sotheby's Monterey on 24–25 August 2018 for $48,405,000 (total, premium included; hammer reported at $44,000,000).

• $51,705,000 − $48,405,000 = $3,300,000. The 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti brought $3.3 million more — about 6.8% above the 2018 car.
• Limits: different chassis, different histories (3413 GT is a 3-litre car with its own Italian championship record), five years apart, in different market conditions. The comparison shows where two documented GTOs cleared at public auction; it does not establish a "GTO price," and private reported sales — including the widely reported ~$70 million private sale of chassis 4153 GT in 2018, which has no auction record — sit outside this auction-only benchmark.

Benchmark two — a current Ferrari list price. Ferrari's current V12 flagship, the 12Cilindri, was listed at launch at $423,000 (€395,000) for the coupé, per contemporary Car and Driver reporting of Ferrari's pricing.

• $51,705,000 ÷ $423,000 ≈ 122. The 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti cost about 122 new 12Cilindris at list.
• Limits: a 2023 auction total against a 2024 launch list price, in different market frames; the 12Cilindri figure is the launch list price, and options move any real 12Cilindri transaction well above list. The line measures scale only.

What the price includes — and what it does not

Included at $51,705,000:

• The 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO by Scaglietti, chassis 3765 LM, with its documented factory history — build sheets for both 1962 factory preparations and the 1963 conversion spec sheet, per the lot page.
• The buyer's premium — $4,705,000 of the total, on the reported $47,000,000 hammer.

Not included / not established:

• Taxes, transport, insurance and the cost of running, showing or vintage-racing a 1962 competition Ferrari: none is in the auction total; none is estimated here.
• The buyer's identity: not disclosed in the sources checked. The seller is named in reporting as Jim Jaeger.
• The car's current location or display status after the sale: not established in the sources checked.