The hammer fell at Gooding Christie’s Pebble Beach sale and the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe CSX2300 instantly rewrote the record books. With fees, the neatly restored blue coupe brought $42,905,000, the highest price ever paid for an American car at auction and the star result of Monterey Car Week 2026.
That single lot did not happen in a vacuum. Monterey’s auctions stacked up about $748,000,000 in sales, far above the roughly $470,000,000 to $500,000,000 analysts had forecast before the week, and the Shelby sat at the top of that surge in demand for top-shelf racing history.
