1967 Toyota 2000GT sells for $2.535M at Amelia Island
Last month, Gooding & Co. teased a 1967 Toyota 2000GT that Carroll Shelby prepped and ran in America’s 1968 SCCA Championship. Headed to the house’s Amelia Island auction this year with a pre-sale estimate of $2.75 to $3.5 million, the question was whether this could be the first Japanese car outside of a charity auction to cross the $2 million barrier. The answer is yes; although just under the estimate, the race car attracted a winning bid of $2,535,000. The haul puts a 2000GT back on top of the list of most expensive Japanese vehicles sold at non-charity auctions. According to info compiled by New Atlas, Toyota’s advanced sports car from the 1960s holds five of the top-ten non-charity sales listings already, but lost its place at the top in 2017 to a Mazda 767B that sold at Gooding & Company’s Amelia Island auction for $1.75 million.
When including the charity class, a 2020 Toyota Supra sold for $2.1 million at Barrett-Jackson’s 2019 Scottsdale auction. So Shelby’s 2000GT put a lot of daylight between it and second place outright, just like the Texan would have wanted.
This car, chassis MF10-100001, was the first production model with a serial number to leave the Toyota line in Japan. It was one of three examples Shelby’s development team prepped for the series, helping to spend the $500,000 Toyota invested in the SCCA racing program. Driver Davey Jordan piloted MF10-100001 to fourth in the championship that year, teammate Scooter Patrick finishing third behind the two Porsche 911s run by the Vasek Polak dealer team. That would usually be considered an outstanding result for a first-time campaign of a brand new car in an automaker’s first effort at a country’s national series. But Toyota didn’t want outstanding, it wanted the gold cup, and as retail customer 2000GTs cost $7,150 — about $2,000 more than a Porsche 911 or a Jaguar XKE at the time, almost $3,000 more than a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette — they needed championship pedigree to get attention. Toyota quit the SCCA series at the end of its first year, and quit producing the 2000GT in 1970 after 351 had been built.
The 2000GT that wouldn’t sell in 1968 for the equivalent of roughly $59,500 in today’s dollars has been changing hands for well more than a million dollars for about eight years now. Not bad for a car its creators considered a loser.
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