The most valuable car ever sold at an American auction is no longer a Ferrari, a Bugatti, or even a Duesenberg. It’s a Cobra. Specifically, chassis CSX2300, a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe that hammered for $39 million and closed at $42,905,000 with fees, comfortably blowing past its $25 million estimate. That’s not just a record for an American car at auction. It’s the most expensive Shelby ever sold, the priciest lot in Gooding’s history, and the single biggest car sale anywhere in the world this year, beating even a $38.5 million Ferrari 250 GTO sold back in January.
To put that number in perspective, the previous benchmark for an American car was a 1935 Duesenberg Model SSJ, which went for $22 million at Pebble Beach in 2018. CSX2300 didn’t just nudge past that figure, it obliterated it by $17 million. Before the Duesenberg, the record belonged to another Cobra entirely, the very first one ever built, CSX2000, which made $13.75 million in 2016. Cobras, it turns out, have a habit of rewriting history.
Only six Daytona Coupes were ever built, and each carries its own slice of the Carroll Shelby legend. They exist because Shelby, freshly retired from driving after winning Le Mans in 1959, decided the open-top Cobra roadster simply wasn’t slippery enough to beat Ferrari’s all-conquering 250 GTO on Europe’s fastest circuits. His young designer Peter Brock solved that with a fastback coupe body and a Kamm tail, built in aluminium by Carrozzeria Grandsport in Modena, of all places. The irony of building a Ferrari-killer next door to Maranello is quite delicious and certainly adds to the history of the car.
CSX2300 wasn’t just present for Shelby American’s landmark 1965 FIA GT Championship win, the first and only time an American manufacturer topped the world GT standings, it then went on to live an entirely separate life. Sold off after the season, it ended up in Japan, racing there until 1968 under a string of owners, before eventually being sold, remarkably, to Carroll Shelby himself in 1975. He kept it until 1998, making CSX2300 the only Daytona Coupe its own creator ever owned.
This Daytona Coupe, which sold at at Gooding Christie’s Pebble Beach auction, remains road legal, race eligible, and by all accounts still properly usable. Which is more than you can say for most other eight-figure auction record-setters.
