The Indy Motor Speedway Museum is auctioning off 11 incredible race cars

• Eleven incredibly special cars will be auctioned by RM Sotheby’s for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum starting February 2025.

• Michael Schumacher’s F1 rookie season car is here and it’s not even close to the top of the list.

• The funds will go toward improvements to the IMS Museum.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is America’s Vatican of Speed. So when such a place decides to auction off part of its museum collection, the cars are less collectibles and more sacred relics. As part of a refurbishment process, the IMS Museum wants to once again focus on vehicles that are directly related to the Indy 500, and that means some truly special machines will go under the hammer.

The list includes 11 cars, spread across three different RM Sotheby’s auctions starting in Stuttgart in February next year. It is an incredibly extensive collection of racing machines. The oldest is an Itala 120 HP from 1907, which has been part of the museum’s collection for almost 60 years. It is said to be one of three survivors and is expected to fetch between $2 million and $3 million.

Not particularly interested in brass-era board track racers? Maybe we can tempt you with literally the fastest car in the world from 1965. The Spirit of America Sonic 1 took speed record icon Craig Breedlove to an incredible, then-record speed of 600.601 miles per hour in November 1965. In a time when nothing seemed impossible, not even the dream of landing on the moon, it is both a piece of history and a relic of the space race’s past.

Other rarities include a supercharged 1930 Bugatti Type 35, a couple of pre-World War I Mercedes (one with a 17.3-liter racing engine), and a Ford GT40 driven by Holman in the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans was used. Moody.

With expected values ​​approaching or exceeding the eight-figure mark, there’s also the stunning 1957 Chevrolet Corvette SS XP-64, a tubular-frame, magnesium-bodied endurance racing car designed by Zora Arkus-Duntov to take on rivals such as the Jaguar D-Type. It has only raced once.

The story continues

It takes a very special machine to outshine a Benetton F1 car from Michael Schumacher’s rookie season in 1991 on this list, but there are not one, but two cars here that do just that.

The first of them is, as you might expect, a Ferrari: the real 1964 Ferrari 250 LM, which won the 1965 Le Mans 24 Hours with racing drivers Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt at the wheel. That’s at least a $30 million car, basically like a Rembrandt was also a race winner.

But the IMS Museum offers something that surpasses even that, an automotive Da Vinci if you will. It is a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W 196 R Streamliner, one of the Silver Arrows racing cars driven by heroes such as Sir Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio. The estimate here is expected to be more than double that for the Ferrari.

Estimates aren’t everything at auction, and in fact it’s often the quirky but affordable cars that are the best to find. In this case, however, every dollar squeezed from this collection goes directly into running a public-access museum located in the heart of a truly iconic race track.

Formula 1 is the sport of kings even in the USA, with corresponding ticket prices. Indy is something for everyone. These 11 cars may be the rarest of the rare, but their auction means nothing but good things for the Inland racing temple.

You might also like this