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Bonhams

06 December 2015

Bonhams Bond Street sale which is limited in size due to space nevertheless included some fantastic cars and even achieved another record. The record was for a Jaguar XK150 which was a concours 3.8 litre drop head coupe in left hand drive format. The estimate of £100,000 to £150,000 looked about right but the bidders for this car chose not follow the form book. We have seen strong prices for good XK cars all year but a price of £427,100 is still huge. You would expect to be able to commission a restoration company to produce a car of similar quality for less but perhaps it was another case of two buyers simply wanting a top car. We doubt this result will raise XK prices further but we can expect these cars to continue demanding strong money during 2016. There were a number of fabulous cars in the lineup for this auction and of the pre war cars on offer we could not help but be impressed by the lovely 1929 Bentley 4.5 litre tourer with coachwork by Vanden Plas. This is a matching numbers car still sporting its original coachwork. The final price of £667,900 seems very deserving of such a well preserved car. The car with the most historical importance in this auction had to be the 1953 Austin-Healey 100/'100S' Coupé n which was Donald Healey’s personal car and is one of just two 100s cars built in coupe form. The price including premium of £639,900 reflects the provenance and rarity of such an interesting car. No high end sale is ever complete without a Mercedes 300SL Gullwing and having seen a few no sales recently we thought we might see a similar result here but in fact the car got away for just under £900,000 including premium.