Nick Mason’s Pop Art McLaren F1 GTR has sold for $34.655 million at RM Sotheby’s Monterey.
It missed the $35 million headline marker by a whisker, but the real story is bigger.
A British racing prototype, road-converted by McLaren and owned by Pink Floyd’s drummer, has just become market evidence.
♔ Full Story
📍 Some cars are rare. Others arrive with their own mythology department.
▪️Nick Mason’s 1996 McLaren F1 GTR, chassis 10R, has sold for $34.655 million at RM Sotheby’s Monterey.
▪️That is a vast number, though fractionally below the pre-sale ‘in excess of $35 million’ positioning. But focusing on the shortfall rather misses the rather enormous point.
▪️This was not an ordinary McLaren F1 GTR, if such a thing can be said without causing the sentence to burst into flames.
▪️Chassis 10R was the first 1996-specification F1 GTR, one of only two short-tail factory prototypes, tested at Le Mans, retained by McLaren, later road-converted by the factory and finished in unmistakable scarlet-and-yellow Pop Art livery.
▪️Then came Nick Mason, Pink Floyd drummer and one of Britain’s most thoughtful collector-car custodians, who owned it for 25 years.
♔ Why it matters: this was not just a sale of horsepower, carbon fibre and rarity.
▪️It was McLaren, Le Mans, Pink Floyd, British engineering and 1990s visual theatre in one very expensive object.
At this level, collectors are not buying transport.
📍 ‘They are buying the car that cannot be replicated.’
