When the Bidding Doesn’t Add Up

By Steven Bell | 8 September 2026

There is something about an auction record that immediately creates suspicion.

When RM Sotheby’s sold a Ferrari F40 for $8.365 million at Monterey this year, an F50 for $12.105 million and an Enzo for $9.41 million, the reaction across parts of social media was predictable. Who was bidding? Were those genuine buyers? Was somebody in the room pushing the price?

The questions are understandable.

RM Sotheby’s generated $376 million at its 2026 Monterey auction, the highest total in the company’s history. Sixty-nine cars sold for at least $1 million and six exceeded $10 million.

But does that mean the market is being manipulated?

There is an important distinction to make.

Auction houses can legitimately bid on behalf of a seller where a reserve exists. RM’s own bidding conditions explicitly allow the auctioneer to place bids on the consignor’s behalf up to, but not beyond, the reserve. Similar practices have existed within the wider auction world for decades.

To somebody watching from the room, that can look remarkably like another person bidding.

It isn't necessarily another buyer.

What would be very different is an auction house secretly placing fictitious bidders into a sale to continue bidding beyond the reserve purely to make a genuine buyer pay more. Despite plenty of online speculation, there is no credible evidence demonstrating that RM Sotheby’s is systematically doing this.

The wider market makes the accusation more difficult to sustain.

Across town, Mecum sold another F50 for $14.575 million — even more than the example at RM — and an Enzo for $12.1 million. Mecum's Monterey sale generated approximately $111.6 million, with modern Ferraris, Porsches and McLarens among its strongest results.

This isn't therefore one auction house producing extraordinary numbers.

More revealing, perhaps, is what happened away from the headline cars. Analysis of 467 verifiable sold lots across four Monterey auction houses found that 241 — just over half — changed hands for less than their published low estimates.

That provides an important counterpoint to the record prices. If bidding were being routinely engineered across the auctions simply to inflate values, it would be difficult to reconcile that with more than half of those cars selling below expectations.

The multimillion-dollar Ferraris inevitably make the headlines. The hundreds of cars selling beneath estimate rarely do.

Something else is happening.

Perhaps the strangest result at Monterey illustrates the problem of interpreting auctions through headline prices.

Ferrari Luce Chassis 0, the first production chassis of Ferrari's new electric model, sold through RM Sotheby’s for $40 million against an estimate above $1.1 million. Social media quickly produced theories involving fake bidding, money laundering and market manipulation.

The buyer subsequently emerged as 87-year-old American billionaire, Ferrari collector and philanthropist Dr Herbert Wertheim.

Wertheim had already paid $26 million for the unique Daytona SP3 599+1 at Ferrari's charity auction in 2025. The entire $40 million Luce price went to educational initiatives through the Ferrari Foundation, and Wertheim has an established history of substantial philanthropic giving.

There may also be a legitimate tax advantage. US rules can permit the portion paid above fair market value at qualifying charity auctions to be treated as a charitable contribution, subject to detailed limitations. Reports have estimated that Wertheim could potentially receive a substantial deduction, although Wertheim himself has not said that tax was his motivation.

In other words, the $40 million was never a meaningful indication that an ordinary Ferrari Luce is suddenly worth $40 million.

Context matters.

The same applies to the extraordinary prices now being achieved by F40s, F50s, Enzos, Carrera GTs and other modern supercars.

A decade ago, the headlines belonged to different cars.

The collector-car market accelerated dramatically through the early 2010s, with 1950s and 1960s Ferraris, important competition cars and exceptional pre-war machinery achieving increasingly remarkable values. The market eventually peaked around 2014 before correcting.

Many cars from that generation have subsequently changed hands for less than the values achieved during that period.

They did not suddenly become less important.

Their audience changed.

The collectors entering their strongest purchasing years today grew up with different bedroom-wall posters. The Ferrari F40 and F50, Porsche 959 and Carrera GT, McLaren F1 and Mercedes-Benz SLR increasingly occupy the emotional territory once held by the 250-series Ferraris and great pre-war cars for an earlier generation.

The evidence increasingly supports that interpretation. Hagerty reported that the average model year of million-dollar-plus auction cars had moved to 1984 by 2025, compared with 1972 only five years earlier. Its UK market analysis has similarly shown relative strength among cars from the 1980s onwards while several older categories have softened.

Auction records therefore need to be treated carefully.

A $14.575 million F50 does not automatically make every F50 worth that amount, any more than a $40 million charity Luce establishes the value of Ferrari's electric production car. Provenance, mileage, specification, rarity and sometimes the circumstances of the auction itself can produce exceptional results.

Nor should every extraordinary price be interpreted as evidence of manipulation.

Money laundering exists. Auction manipulation exists. Undisclosed conflicts of interest can exist wherever valuable assets are traded. The collector-car world would be naïve to imagine itself uniquely immune.

But suspicion is not evidence.

What can actually be observed is a market transferring its attention from one generation of motor cars to another.

In another ten years, it may be the limited-production supercars and hypercars of the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s producing numbers that appear equally difficult to comprehend.

By then, another generation will probably be asking exactly the same question.

Who on earth is paying that?