1963 Corvette Grand Sport Sets $18.7M Auction Record

The bidding on the 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport chassis 003 did not just creep past expectations at RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale, it blasted through them, landing at $18,705,000 with fees and rewriting the Corvette record book in one shot. Collectors in the room knew they were watching a historic moment for American racing cars.

That final price more than doubled the previous public-auction high for any Corvette and crushed the Grand Sport’s already-lofty $11–13 million estimate. For anyone tracking blue-chip American performance cars, this is not just another big Monterey number. It is now the benchmark you have to measure serious Corvette money against, even as another car in Monterey grabbed the overall American racing-car record (see last paragraph).

How This Grand Sport Reset The Corvette Market

The Monterey result is straightforward: chassis 003 of the 1963 Corvette Grand Sport crossed the RM Sotheby’s block on August 15, opened around $5 million, then climbed in roughly $500,000 steps before hammering at $17 million and reaching $18,705,000 with buyer’s premium. That makes it the most expensive Corvette ever sold at public auction by a wide margin.

Before this car, the Corvette auction ceiling sat far lower. RM Sotheby’s Miami 2025 sale saw the Corvette SS Project XP-64 bring just over $7.7 million, which was already treated as a breakthrough. Reporting on the 1963 Grand Sport’s sale cites a prior $3.85 million Corvette record from 2014, underlining how violently this Grand Sport just reset the curve at the top of the Corvette market.

The pre-sale buzz around this specific car set the stage. It carried an $11–13 million estimate and was widely framed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity, with only five Grand Sports built and this chassis long held off the market. If you look back at earlier coverage of the 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport heading to RM Sotheby’s Monterey, the expectation was already that it would become the priciest Corvette ever, just not by this much.

Where It Sits Among Monterey’s Heavy Hitters

Chassis 003 is not just any C2 race car. It is one of five factory-built Grand Sports from Chevrolet’s short-lived bid to take on European GT royalty, a program cut off before it could officially challenge at Le Mans. This particular coupe is also documented as the first of the three Grand Sport coupes constructed, giving it extra weight among an already tiny group.

That context helps explain how this Corvette ended up in the same Monterey conversation as the $40 million Ferrari Luce charity car and the $34.7 million McLaren F1 GTR, even if it did not match those totals. RM Sotheby’s own recap grouped the Grand Sport’s $18,705,000 sale with those headline results and a Ferrari Daytona SP3 at $17,825,000 as the core of its week. The wider Monterey story, though, is that a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe CSX2300 at Gooding Christie’s Pebble Beach brought $42,905,000 and set the overall American-car auction record, more than doubling the Grand Sport’s price.

Motor1’s Take: This Grand Sport now sets the bar for Corvettes and underscores how provenance and documented period competition drive top-tier values, even as the Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe takes the crown as the priciest American racing car ever sold at auction.