This car, Lot 158, sold for $3,958,656 (€3,380,000), including buyer’s premium, at RM Sotheby’s Monaco sale, on April 25, 2026.
To those of us “of a certain age,” the sports racing cars that contested the world championships of the mid-to-late 1950s have an enduring magic. Though the state of the art in their era, they were and remain approachable things, purely mechanical constructs from an era before computers, wide, sticky tires or serious aerodynamic concessions.
Conceived by visionaries within the available materials and technology of the time, then hammered, welded, forged, machined and assembled by individuals, they remain uniquely humanist artifacts. Even the most exotic of any of them — Mercedes’ 300SLR (the Swiss watch of race cars) — could be started, run and driven by a couple of competent mechanics with normal toolkits. I’ve been there.
As automobile racing staggered back to its feet following World War II, nobody had much to work with. So, the first post-war generation were mostly rehabbed and upgraded pre-war concepts: ladder frames, simple suspensions and engines originating from the late 1930s. Jaguar initiated the next generation in 1951 with its C-type racer, using a tubular spaceframe chassis and more-modern front suspension with low-drag aerodynamics learned during the war, powered by its new DOHC inline-6. Ferrari, a new company founded after the war, stayed with essentially pre-war chassis designs but created very powerful, complex 12-cylinder engines to make them competitive.
Aston’s rebirth
Aston Martin had been around since 1913 as a niche marketer of small sporting cars but went bankrupt immediately after World War II. Industrialist David Brown had done well in those years and bought Aston Martin and another company, Lagonda, which had a nifty W.O. Bentley-designed DOHC 6-cylinder engine. He combined them to create the DB series of Astons, starting with sporting DB2 coupes.
By 1952 Brown was ready to go racing, so Aston created the DB3, a purpose-built competitor to the C-type. It proved to be a bit of a catastrophe — heavy, clumsy and uncompetitive — so engineer Bill Watson was brought in to start over, more or less. The result was the DB3S, and it worked beautifully. Aston originally built 10 Works racers for itself and then made a run of 20 customer cars. The Works cars were raced, crashed, rebuilt, crashed again, sometimes reframed, etc. Today, there are only five factory team DB3Ss with clean provenance. I think all the customer cars survived with varying degrees of originality.
Aston Martins were always expensive; the DB3S was roughly twice the price of Jaguar’s C-type and a bit less than a Ferrari 750 Monza. They were successful in racing but not wildly so: one overall win at the Irish Tourist Trophy, a 2nd at the tragic 1955 Le Mans and lots of podiums over the years. At the time, they were — and remain — more of a cult favorite than primetime hero. All in, there were 30 DB3Ss vs. 53 C-types and 31 750 Monzas.
Best of the bunch?
Over my roughly 35 years in this business, I have been privileged to deal in, be around, drive and, in one case (300SLR), at least ride in virtually all the great mid-’50s sport racers. I have learned that each of them has a distinct personality. All are fantastic, but each is different in tactile ways, including how it fits, how it moves at speed, how it enters and takes a set in corners and how it responds to the driver.
Some are just flat-out brutal. The Maserati 450S comes to mind; it is such a beast that the only way to go fast is to completely commit to wringing its neck. If you are strong enough, brave enough and good enough, it will respond and go like hell, but it is emphatically not for the timid. Ferrari’s 335 Sport is similar but a bit more forgiving.
Jaguar’s C- and D-types are wonderful drivers, being stable, secure and comfortable, but they tend to feel rather big. You feel like you are sitting down inside them, peering out. By comparison, Aston’s DB3S feels like stepping into a Lotus or a Sprite. You feel more exposed, and it feels so light, nimble and quick that it takes a while to adjust and get comfortable.
Once you do, the Aston is (for me, at least) by far the most fun to drive. On the track, it invites and rewards wild abandon; stomp the brakes entering a corner, then pitch it in and the tail will step out about 15 degrees, then take a set while you drift through, steering with the throttle. The car absolutely loves it and makes even a moderately competent driver feel like Stirling Moss. An extremely experienced friend took one out for the first time and returned hooting and laughing, he was having so much fun. On the track or on a tour, the DB3S is simply a joy to drive.
For love, not money
In trying to understand the market trends for mid-century sports racers, I used SCM’s Platinum Auction Database to follow roughly 20 years of sales for three representative cars: Jaguar’s C-type, Aston’s DB3S and the 4-cylinder Ferrari 750 Monza. Interestingly, all three have carried similar value over the years. This makes sense, all being roughly 3-liter cars.
The Aston and Jag are both 6-cylinder cars with chain-driven cams, at home both on the track and on tours, while the 750 Monza, with gear-driven cams, is really track-only, but it is a Ferrari. Starting at about $2 million circa 2006, all rose to $4 million in 2013, then jumped up in a bubble through 2017 before settling back to roughly $4 million today. Using 2017 constant dollars to reflect inflation, none of them have done much more than hold value in 20 years.
Jaguar D-types, Maserati 300Ss and the five good Works DB3Ss (chassis #1, 2, 4, 5 and 9) are their own category, running about 150% of the other three. Twelve-cylinder Ferraris of this era are collector crown jewels and are wildly more valuable.
It seems to me that talking much about the market value of these cars is missing the point. It shouldn’t be about money. Rather, they are all fabulous toys for those fortunate enough to have the interest and wherewithal to own them. They are beautiful, exotic, mechanically and historically interesting and rare. Over the past 20 years, they have been a secure store of value, but not a place to speculate. Were I lucky enough to own one, I would pick the Aston because it is gorgeous, the rarest, and by far the most fun to drive. This DB3S was fairly bought.
