Steve McQueen's 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 Spider heads to auction at $20 million

A 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 S N.A.R.T. Spider once owned by Steve McQueen is heading to auction for the first time, with Gooding Christie's estimating it will sell for between $15 million and $20 million. The sale headlines the auction house's inaugural Retromobile New York event on November 21.

Only 10 examples of the N.A.R.T. Spider were ever built. Luigi Chinetti, the American Ferrari importer who ran the North American Racing Team and had persuaded Enzo Ferrari to build a successor to the 250 California Spider, originally ordered 25, but weak early demand cut the run to a tenth of that.

McQueen's car was the sixth built, chassis No. 10453, and it left the factory finished in a metallic blue called Blu Sera. It was delivered to the actor through Hollywood Sports Cars in Los Angeles after he fell for the model on the set of The Thomas Crown Affair, where Faye Dunaway's character drove one and dismissed it as "one of those red Italian things."

McQueen reportedly disliked the factory blue on sight, telling his friend Lee Brown, a body shop owner, "I really don't like this shade of blue. Can we change it?" Brown repainted the car a darker shade, reupholstered the seats with custom stitching and extra bolstering, modified the radio surround and removed the bumpers for a race-car look.

McQueen used the car hard on Southern California's Pacific Coast Highway and Mulholland Drive before it was rear-ended at a Malibu stoplight, damaging both ends.

Where the car went after McQueen

McQueen sold the Spider to fellow racer and entrepreneur J. David Kopf of Tujunga, California. David Brynan, senior specialist at Gooding Christie's, said his team traced a 1971 photo of the car at a Hollywood Bowl show that confirmed it still wore the dark blue McQueen had specified rather than the original factory color.

Kopf kept the car until 1985, when he sold it to New York-based Ferrari specialist Grand Prix SSR, whose team repainted it back to its original Blu Sera. The following year it passed to its current owner, Ferrari collector Anthony Wang, then president of the software company CA Technologies.

Wang has shown the Spider only twice in almost 40 years of ownership: at the 1996 Louis Vuitton Classic in New York and at the 2003 "La Bella Macchina: The Art of Ferrari" exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia. Brynan called it "a collector's dream," noting it has never before been offered at auction.

What comparable N.A.R.T. Spiders have sold for

N.A.R.T. Spiders rarely surface at auction. The example used in The Thomas Crown Affair sold through Gooding Christie's in 2005 for a then-record $3.96 million, while a red 1967 car once owned by Eddie Smith Sr., a former mayor of Lexington, North Carolina, sold at RM Sotheby's in 2013 for $27.5 million.

Wang has recently been thinning his broader collection, which also includes a pair of 250 GTOs, a 250 Testa Rossa and a 250 California Spider. In August, he sold his Ferrari 250 P race car through Gooding Christie's Monterey sale for $18.7 million, a figure that sets a rough benchmark for what his name can add at auction.

Brynan said the McQueen car's appeal rests on more than its first owner. "This car is unlike any of the other N.A.R.T. Spiders, not just because of its Steve McQueen ownership, which itself is a huge draw, but also because it has been out of the public eye for so long, and has never been offered at auction before," he said.

Ferrari's place among classic collectibles

Ferrari remains the marque our garage coverage ranks first among Italian car brands, a reputation built on a record 16 Formula One constructors' championships and reinforced at the top end of the collector market it still commands decades after a model's debut.

We have tracked the Ferrari 250 GTO clearing $50 million in our guide to the best classic cars for collectors, a marker of how the marque's rarest 1960s road cars now trade. The N.A.R.T. Spider's expected range falls well below that figure but far above most other 1960s convertibles.

The sale also follows the barely driven Gordon Murray T.50 we reported could fetch over $6 million at auction, another instance this year of a rare, low-mileage performance car with a documented history commanding a premium over comparable examples without one.

Gooding Christie's has not disclosed a reserve for the McQueen Spider beyond its estimate, and it remains unclear whether Wang plans further consignments from his collection. His Ferrari list already spans two 250 GTOs, a 250 Testa Rossa, a 250 California Spider and the recently sold 250 P race car.