The 10 Most Expensive Porsches Ever Sold at Auction

The Porsche name means different things to different people. For some, a Porsche is a status symbol. For others, it’s an attainable dream car. Some look no further than the endless flavors of 911. Some love the “other” models, from the 356 to the 944 to the Boxster and Cayman.

Anyone familiar with this family business-turned-automotive empire, however, knows that Porsche is a company dripping with the kind of “history” and “heritage” that all carmakers love to tout, and one with a well-earned reputation for clever engineering and high performance. Much of that reputation is derived from the race track, and when it comes to the most desirable Porsches of them all, the cars that helped make that reputation top the list. A few have made big appearances at public auction over the years. In the grand scheme of things, however, there are more valuable cars out there (in fact, no Porsches crack the list of the 30 most expensive auction cars ever, which you can read here), but below are the 10 most expensive Porsches ever sold at auction. All of them have a racing connection.

10. 1958 550A Spyder

Sold for $5,170,000 at Bonhams Scottsdale 2018

The mid-engine 550 was Porsche’s first purpose-built racing car, and it quickly became a top contender in the small-displacement classes of international sports car racing. The term “giant killer” gets thrown out a lot, because 550s handily kept up with—and sometimes beat—far bigger and more powerful cars thanks to their light weight and punchy four-cam engines.

The 550A that debuted in early 1956 employed a more sophisticated spaceframe chassis and shed weight compared to the first cars. This one immediately went racing, first owned and often driven by Carel Godin de Beaufort (decades before Max Verstappen, de Beaufort was the first Dutchman to score points in F1). It’s the second-to-last of just 40 550As built, and its race highlights include second in class and fifth overall at Le Mans in 1958, and a class win at the Nürburgring 1000Km. In 1959, it sold to Canada and had considerable success there, and in more recent years it participated in the Mille Miglia Storica 10 times.

9. 1955 550 Spyder

Sold for $5,335,000 at Gooding & Co. Amelia Island 2016

Most 550s, including the many replicas out there, wear some form of German racing silver. Which is kind of a shame, because they look great in any color. Take this one, for example. It sold new in Paris, hence that handsome French Blue. It doesn’t have any race history to speak of, but when it sold in 2016 it was a three-owner car and completely original other than an old repaint, and its odometer showed just 10,337 miles.

The third of those three owners was comedian/Porschephile Jerry Seinfeld, who brought 16 Porsches and two VWs to Gooding & Co.’s 2016 Amelia Island sale. The blue 550 made up a big chunk of the collection’s $22M haul.

8. 1960 RS60

Sold for $5,400,000 at Gooding & Co. Pebble Beach 2015

Porsche kept on developing its original 550 concept with a quick succession of new racing models right up to the early 1960s. For the ’60 season there was the RS60, which featured a taller windscreen and wider cockpit to comply with a rules change, as well as new double-wishbone rear suspension and a larger 1.6-liter, 160-horsepower version of the four-cam Type 547 engine.

This is the last of four works-raced RS60 Spyders, and it had a lot of famous butts in its seat—Stirling Moss, Graham Hill, Jo Bonnier, Dan Gurney, Edgar Barth, Hans Hermann, and Al Holbert. It had a lot of famous tracks under its tires, too, including Le Mans, Sebring, the Targa Florio, and the Nürburgring in period. It failed to finish at any of those, but it did finish second overall and first in class at Mosport and won the Governor’s Trophy as well as a class victory in the Nassau Trophy in the Bahamas in 1961. It was later restored and became a vintage racer.

7. 2007 RS Spyder Evo

Sold for $5,615,000 at Gooding & Co. Pebble Beach 2022

The RS Spyder was one of the most successful racing prototypes of the mid- to late-2000s. Porsche designed and built it; private teams campaigned it in Europe and North America. By far the most recognizable RS Spyders are the yellow and red ones raced under the “DHL Porsche Penske” banner in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS), and this one was part of Penske’s 2007 and 2008 championship-winning seasons.

Its debut race was at Sebring in 2007 to an underwhelming eighth in class, but it finished third overall at St. Petersburg and Mosport as well as second overall at Long Beach and Mid-Ohio, and it took the checkered flag at both Salt Lake City and Lime Rock. Penske used it as a spare car for the 2008 season, but it did come out to win its class and finish fourth overall at the Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta.

6. 1998 911 GT1 Strassenversion

Sold for $5,665,000 at Gooding & Co. Amelia Island 2017

Following the McLaren F1’s overall win at Le Mans in 1995, Porsche decided to build its own car around the then-loose regulations of the GT1 class. The company may have called it the 911 GT1, but this new “911” shared very few parts with the standard road car. For starters, its 3.2-liter twin-turbo engine was water-cooled rather than air-cooled, mounted in the middle rather than the rear, and derived from the old 962 Group C prototype rather than anything in the 911 lineup. Much of the chassis and suspension were all-new as well, and the long, low body only had a passing resemblance to the 911 you could buy at the dealership. On track, the GT1 was successful but not all-conquering against the competition from McLaren and Mercedes-Benz, though a GT1-98 version did score on reliability and win overall at Le Mans in 1998.

To satisfy homologation requirements, Porsche built a token number (most sources say 20) of 911 GT1s for the road, called the Strassenversion (or Straßenversion if you like to type in German). Uncivilized and little changed from the GT1s at Le Mans, the Strassenversion was, as Automobile magazine put it, “a racing car tuned for road use, not vice versa.” This Arctic Silver one went to the RM Monterey auction in 2012, and was a no-sale at a $1.175M high bid. Whether that was prescient or just good luck isn’t clear, but a couple of years later the Porsche market began to take off and it brought several times that amount in 2017.

5. 1972 917/10 Spyder

Sold for $5,830,000 at Mecum Monterey 2012

Few cars of any type, in any type of racing, were as dominant as the turbocharged flat-12–powered 917/10 and 917/30 were in the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, “Can-Am” for short.

With rule changes in the World Sportscar Championship leaving the 917 obsolete for 1972, Porsche turned its eye across the Atlantic to Can-Am, where there really weren’t many rules to begin with. Engine size had no limits, forced induction was allowed, aerodynamics were largely unrestricted. A Can-Am car basically had to have two seats, bodywork over the wheels, pass a basic safety check, and that’s it.

Since its first season in 1966, Can-Am had mostly been dominated by British chassis from Lola and McLaren, powered by heavily modified large-displacement American V-8s. But Porsche’s new 917/10—a spider-bodied, turbocharged version of its 917 endurance racer now capable of over 900 hp—broke McLaren’s hold on the series in the 1972 season. Team Penske, sponsored by L&M cigarettes, campaigned the 917/10 in the ’72 season with drivers George Follmer and Mark Donohue. There were nine races in the ’72 Can-Am season, and the Penske team won six of them. This was the car, driven mostly by Follmer, that won the title.

4. 1985 959 Paris-Dakar

Sold for $5,945,000 at RM Sotheby’s Porsche 70th Anniversary Auction 2018

Contested from the middle of Paris to the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the original Paris-Dakar Rally first ran in 1978. In a few short years the event’s thousands of miles of punishing rocks, boulders, dunes, rivers and other dangers established it as the most grueling and violent event of its kind anywhere in the world.

For its first few years, most of the Paris-Dakar entry list consisted of French amateurs in lightly modified road vehicles (bikes, cars, and trucks), but big-budget teams started tackling the rally raid in the mid-1980s. Porsche was one of the first factory teams, and its trio of 953s (essentially 911s with upgraded suspension and manually controlled four-wheel-drive systems) took first, sixth, and 26th in the 1984 event. The team came back in 1985 with three development versions of the 959, which were similar to the upcoming all-wheel-drive twin-turbo supercar but with normally aspirated Carrera engines. Chainsmoking Frenchman René Metge, who finished first in the 1984 event, drove this one. He even won two stages, before a ruptured oil line forced it to retire, and the other two 959s failed to finish as well. Porsche—and Metge—made a triumphant return in the 1986 Paris-Dakar with a full-fledged, twin-turbo 959. The other two 959s finished second and sixth.

3. 1997 911 GT1

Sold for $7,045,000 at Broad Arrow Monterey Jet Center 2024

After a rapid development and thousands of test miles, Porsche’s new 911 GT1 finished first and second in class at Le Mans in 1996, and in the BPR Global GT Series, factory Porsches won all three races they entered. Porsche then got to work building a handful of customer cars for the 1997 season, and this one went to Roock Racing of Leverkusen, Germany.

For the ’97 season, what had been the BPR series effectively became the FIA GT Championship, and Roock Racing’s car competed in it. The GT1 finished fifth at Hockenheim and took second place at Helsinki, but after an early DNF at Le Mans it sold to the U.S. and had a more successful second life in the States, with two poles and four straight wins in the IMSA GT Championship and a series title for its team, Rohr Racing. It then raced in the 1998 Canada GT Challenge Cup, and was racing competitively as late as 2001, when it finished second at Lime Rock. Never wrecked, it later entered into collector ownership and returned to the wild yellow multicolor livery from its Rohr Racing years.

2. 1982 956

Sold for $10,120,000 at Gooding & Co. Pebble Beach 2015

The 956 and the 962 that succeeded it were the cars to beat in top-level endurance racing for almost all of the 1980s. The Porsches were fast, reliable, and, because they also sold to privateer teams, plentiful.

The factory also campaigned them, though, and this is the third of 10 works-raced 956s, finished in the famous Rothmans Tobacco livery. It raced at Le Mans in 1982 with Jochen Mass and Vern Schuppan driving, and finished second in an all-956 sweep of the top three places. It then won the next four races it entered, and when it came back to Le Mans in 1983, Schuppan co-drove with Al Holbert and Hurley Haywood to win outright, barely a minute ahead of another works 956. It was Porsche’s third straight win at Le Mans in a streak of seven (1981–87). Le Mans winners are a rare sight at auction (there’s only one per year, after all), so it wasn’t a big surprise to see this become the first Porsche to break eight figures.

1. 1970 917K

Sold for $14,080,000 by Gooding & Co. Pebble Beach 2017

While the 956 above raced in the middle of Porsche’s hot streak at Le Mans, the company didn’t win overall at the French sports car race until 1970, with the 917K. A 917K won again in ’71, and John Wyer’s Gulf Oil–sponsored cars were dominant in both seasons. Gulf-liveried Porsches became even more famous in 1971 with the release of Steve McQueen’s film Le Mans, in which Porsche’s battles against the Ferrari 512s made it to the big screen.

Although this car had an unremarkable history in competition, its owner, Jo Siffert, leased it to McQueen’s Solar Productions and it not only appeared in several scenes of the film but also served as a camera car, capturing some of the movie’s stellar shots on-track. Later restored after many years in storage, it wasn’t the most expensive car in Monterey in 2017, but it was by far the most expensive Porsche, and remains so.

Another Gulf-colored 917 used in the production of the movie sold for $1.32M in 2000 and was bought by Jerry Seinfeld in 2001; it was the star car at Mecum Kissimmee this year. Its $25M high bid handily would have made it number one on this list, but for whatever reason $25M just wasn’t enough.