The 1965 Le Mans 24-hour winning Ferrari 250 LM, driven by Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt has been sold by RM Sotheby’s at its Paris auction, for $59.2 million Australian dollars.
It was part of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum collection, where it has been housed for the past 54 years after being acquired from Chinetti Motors following the Daytona 24-hour race.
One of 32 built, this 250 LM sealed Ferrari’s sixth consecutive 24-hour race victory at Le Mans and remains the only privateer-entered Ferrari to win the famous twice-around-the-clock enduro.
It’s also the only Ferrari built during Enzo Ferrari’s reign to compete in six 24-hour races, including three times at Le Mans and three times at the 24 Hours of Daytona.
The 250 LM is in highly original condition with matching-numbers engine and gearbox and it sold with copies of 1965, 1968 and 1969 Le Mans papers, paperwork from Luigi Chinetti’s ownership, the 1970 purchase documents, parts, service invoices and a history report by Marcel Massini.
Informed opinion at the time is this car should never have won Le Mans as it was considered an also ran. It’s believed its drivers, Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt, shared that view and pushed it hard to break it so they could go home early, but it stayed the distance and won the race.
Entered by Luigi Chinetti’s North American Racing Team, it marked the sixth consecutive outright win at Le Mans by a Ferrari and Ferrari’s last win in this race until 2023. It also added a Le Mans win for Chinetti as an entrant, to the three he’d already amassed as a driver.
The 250LM was essentially a closed-coupé version of the open 250 P sports prototype, itself a mid/rear-engined replacement for the front-engined 250 GTO, using a similar 3.0-litre V12 engine. This concept drew the ire of Enzo Ferrari who said, “The horse should pull the cart, not push it.”
Ferrari debuted the 250 LM at the Paris Salon in October 1963, but the FIA would not homologate it, which hurt potential sales as a road car, and in turn led to not enough examples being built for a second attempt at homologation. This meant that the 250 LM ran as a sports prototype not a GT as was intended.
For Le Mans in 1965, a 3.3-litre sports racing car — even one with Ferrari’s pedigree, didn’t appear to be a contender against the muscle of the six Ford GT40s (two of them with 7-litre V8s) and five Daytona Coupes.
Practice confirmed this with the 250 LM lapping 12 seconds slower than the 7-litre GT40 of Chris Amon and Phil Hill, equivalent to over an hour, over the course of the race. Five 250 LMs were entered, all privateers, but the Ferraris favoured for top honours included a trio of works entered, purpose-built, 4-litre P2 prototypes.
The 1965 race began as expected, with the Fords blasting away from the pack. But, in classic tortoise-and-hare fashion, the tables soon turned.
The big Fords were heavy on fuel and had to pit more frequently, while their gearboxes began to wilt from the power and torque of their engines. The 4.7-litre GT40s also suffered mechanically (as did the similarly engined Daytona Coupes) and after seven hours all the Fords had retired.
At this point the works Ferraris filled the top three places, but as night fell so did the attrition rate and they soon fell by the wayside. Gregory entered the pits after his first stint with the V12 running on six cylinders; the problem was fixed after 30 minutes.
That was when the drivers decided they might as well go hell-for-leather to make up time, reasoning the car was unlikely to trouble the leaderboard. It wouldn’t matter too much if it didn’t last the distance. But it did and it won the 24 hours of Le Mans.