Missed but Not Forgotten: Some of the Year’s Best Deals

Just before the Pebble Beach sales there are a couple of weeks without auctions – a kind of calm before the storm. We could take a week’s holiday ourselves, or we could discuss at length an auction we didn’t have time to cover. Or we simply enjoy the "what we missed" moment, our opportunity to revisit a few lots that, for various reasons, never received a little ink even though they deserved it entirely.

We start in January with Broad Arrow. The Americans at Rétromobile did not organise live bidding – unlike what will happen in 2027 – but they did run an experiment: bringing around seventy cars to display and then accepting bids through their online platform. A hybrid sale that had been tried a few years earlier. And we are not talking about inexpensive cars, but genuine heavyweights of the automotive firmament. Take the top lot, the 1992 Benetton B192 F1. This example was driven by Michael Schumacher, and not in a minor race but at the Belgian Grand Prix, where he claimed the first of his 91 victories in the top formula. It was also used in four other races, including a second-place finish at the Canadian GP, all in the hands of the German standard-bearer. Furthermore, the B192 was the last F1 car with a manual gearbox to win a Formula 1 Grand Prix. After its racing life it was retained by Benetton, which later passed it to the Renault Classic collection – all without it ever appearing in a public sale. Naturally, a car carrying such a weight of history needed no advertising; it sold itself. The estimate was "over €8,500,000" – decidedly ambitious – but the bids were substantial. One can hardly call €5,082,000 pocket change (bearing in mind that the F1 market is a niche, given the difficulty of actually using these cars); perhaps the seller was disappointed, but I believe the price was fair.