Goodwood Revival auction results 2026: three cars in four sold, and most of them sold cheap

Table of Contents

• The headline and the small print
• Scoring my own homework
• The cars that did better than expected
• A very bad day for early Jaguars
• What it means if you are buying or selling
• Next up

A week ago I called Bonhams' sale at the Goodwood Revival the one sale that would tell us where the market is. It has now told us, and the answer is a bit more awkward than a single number can carry.

All the figures below come from Bonhams' own published results for the sale. Prices include the buyer's premium unless I say "hammer", and estimates are always hammer figures, so I compare hammer with estimate throughout.

The headline and the small print

Bonhams offered 94 cars on Saturday afternoon (two more were withdrawn beforehand) and sold 72 of them. That is a sell-through of 77%, against 55% at last year's Revival sale. The cars made £5,356,801 between them, a shade more than the £5,041,831 of September 2025.

On that basis you could call it a good day, and some people will. I would not, for two reasons.

The first is what the total has to cover. This was two sales rolled into one, since Bonhams dropped its Festival of Speed auction this year. Last year those two sales made a little over £15 million together. This year Goodwood produced £5.4 million. The July sale's hypercar crowd did not follow it to September, and it never looked likely that they would.

The second is price. Of the 72 cars that sold, 47 went for a hammer price below their low estimate. Only four beat their top estimate. Last year, on The Classic Valuer's count, 39% of sold cars went below the low estimate. This year it was 65% on mine. Methods differ a little, but not by that much.

Some of that is down to how the catalogue was built. Thirty-six cars were offered without reserve, including a run of 21 microcars, small cars and the odd club racer that opened the sale. A no-reserve car sells by definition, so all 36 did, and 31 of them went under their low estimate. Strip those out and the cars that carried a reserve sold 36 out of 58, which is 62%.

Scoring my own homework

I made four predictions last week. Here is how they did.

One: the 1936 Aston Martin 2-litre Speed Model and the two-owner DB4 Vantage Convertible would do well, with the 356A Speedster as the bellwether. Wrong, and not narrowly. The Speed Model, Nick Mason's old car with a Spa 24 Hours history, sold, and was the second-dearest car of the day, but at a hammer price of £300,000 against a £500,000 to £600,000 estimate (£345,000 with premium). The DB4 Vantage Convertible, the catalogue's lead car at £700,000 to £900,000, did not sell. The Speedster was offered without reserve and made £135,000 hammer against a £175,000 to £225,000 guide. As a bellwether it rang loud and clear. It just rang the wrong way for me.

Two: at least one of the Nissan P35 and the Jordan 191 would go home. Right, and then some, because both did. The Group C car that never raced and the 7-Up Jordan with no engine found no buyers at £400,000 and £350,000 low estimates. Wonderful objects, but cars that need a paragraph of explaining are having a thin time this year.

Three: sell-through needed to be comfortably over 60% for the merger to count as a success. On the headline figure, 77%, that is a pass. On the reserved cars alone, 62%, it is a pass by the width of a tax disc. I will give the merger its due: Bonhams got a lot of cars sold. What it did not get was the money.

Four: the two DB4s would test British 1960s money. They did, and the result was split. The 1961 Series III saloon sold at exactly its £350,000 low estimate, £402,500 with premium, and was the day's highest price. The convertible went home. So the more ordinary DB4 found its level, and the rarer, dearer one could not find anyone to meet the vendor.

Two right, one split, and the one that mattered most, the prices, wrong. I said you would read about it here first if I was wrong.

The cars that did better than expected

Not everything went cheap. The four cars that cleared their top estimate are worth a look, because they tell you what buyers will still stretch for.

A 1936 Frazer Nash-BMW 319 Type 55 roadster made £145,000 hammer, well over its £80,000 to £100,000 estimate, and £166,750 with premium. That is a pre-war sports car with a proper Anglo-German pedigree (AFN sold BMWs in Britain under the Frazer Nash badge), and to my eye it was the stand-out result of the afternoon.

A 1980 Aston Martin V8 Vantage made £165,000 hammer against £130,000 to £160,000. A 1965 Ford Mustang convertible made £46,000 against £30,000 to £40,000. And a little 1976 Suzuki Fronte Coupé, guided at £3,000 to £5,000, reached £7,000, which I rather enjoyed.

Just behind them, a 1971 Ferrari 365 GT 2+2 made £220,000 hammer, inside its £180,000 to £240,000 estimate. So did a 1958 Aston Martin DB Mark III at £125,000 and a 1967 DB6 Vantage project at £88,000. At £120,000 a 1935 Bentley 3½-litre drophead reached its top estimate.

A very bad day for early Jaguars

The other end of the results makes grim reading if you own an SS. A 1935 SS90 roadster, estimated at £170,000 to £200,000, sold for £90,000 hammer. A 1932 SS1 coupé made £46,000 against £70,000 to £90,000. Several older Jaguar saloons were offered without reserve and went for a fraction of their guides: a 1936 SS Jaguar 2½-litre at £9,000 against £35,000 to £45,000, and a 1949 Mark V at £9,500 against £30,000 to £40,000.

Some caution is due here. Condition matters enormously on cars of this age, and I have not seen them. But the pattern matches what we saw at Silverstone in July, where the honest, usable E-types and Mk2s sold well and the rest struggled. This time even the old cars could not rely on age alone.

What it means if you are buying or selling

Put the Revival next to the Iconic Sale in July and Monterey in August and the message is steady. There is plenty of money about, and it is buying. It is simply refusing to pay last year's asking price for anything, however good the story.

If you are selling, set the reserve at what comparable cars have actually made this year, not what they were estimated at. The DB4 Series III sold at its low estimate. The DB4 convertible, with a reserve somewhere above wherever the bidding stopped, went home.

If you are buying, this is the best autumn in several years. The top of the market has room to negotiate, and a no-reserve lot at a big sale can be a genuine chance.

Next up

The club-level sales carry on through the autumn. H&H at Kelham Hall and Mathewsons at Pickering both start on Wednesday 23 September, and Anglia's Marketplace Classics sale at King's Lynn follows on Saturday the 26th. That is the end of the market where most of us actually buy, and it has been in far better shape than the headlines all year. Dates and details for all of them are on our auctions page.