The Sale
The hammer fell at $2.7 million, with the auction closing on 30 September (Carscoops logged the result on 1 October). Joopiter, the auction house founded by Pharrell Williams, had guided the Ferrari at $700,000 to $1,300,000. It blew through that ceiling with room to spare, and the buyer has not been identified. This was a US sale, and all prices here are in dollars.
Caitlin Donovan, Joopiter’s Global Head of Sale, put the result down to a combination of accessibility and appetite. “With a [relatively] affordable starting bid and price point, it makes sense that we had significant competitive bidding,” she said. “This is one of those remarkable objects that transcends a number of categories.”
That word, transcends, is doing a lot of work. It is also the thread running through the whole sale.
The Car
Chassis 108712 is a 1997 550 Maranello, one of 3,083 built. It wears Rosso Barchetta paint, tan leather inside and chrome-finished five-spoke wheels, a specification that reads as restrained by modern supercar standards and all the more handsome for it. Carscoops lists the colour as Rosso Corsa, and the two names are close enough in shade that the discrepancy has gone largely unremarked; the distinction matters to Ferrari purists, though not to the bidding.
The odometer showed 18,501 miles (29,774 km) at the time of sale, of which Jordan covered roughly 6,400 miles (10,299 km). The car is described as being in excellent condition.
There is one detail that separates this 550 from every other one on the planet. Jordan is 6ft 6in, and a standard 550 Maranello is not built for a man that size. Ferrari’s solution was a custom driver’s seat with slimmer padding and new rails, fitted so he could actually fit behind the wheel. It is the kind of modification that would count against a car in a concours setting and counts enormously in favour of this one.
Provenance and the Decade-Long Hunt
Jordan ordered the car new in late May 1997 through Foreign Cars Italia of Greensboro, North Carolina. He kept it until 2002, driving it to and from Chicago Bulls games and practices with an Illinois plate reading “MJ 5”. It then passed through Lake Forest Sportscars in the Chicago area to a California owner, and after that it simply vanished.
For around 24 years the car was never offered for public sale. Miami dealership Curated spent a decade looking for it. The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: an incomplete chassis number posted on an internet forum. Curated used that fragment to reconstruct the VIN, then traced the car through Ferrari dealer records and acquired it sight unseen.
That is a remarkable piece of detective work, and it is not the first time the dealership has pulled it off. Curated previously located Jordan’s 512 TR, which suggests a deliberate strategy of hunting the cars of one very specific owner.
Before the sale, the 550 returned to Chicago in May for a photoshoot on the grounds of Jordan’s mansion. A car that had been invisible for two decades was suddenly back where it started, this time as an auction lot.
Why It Made Ten Times a Normal 550
A standard 550 Maranello trades for $200,000 to $300,000. High-mileage examples can be found for under $150,000. Strong demand for low-mileage cars has pushed some past $500,000 this year, but nothing in the ordinary market gets close to $2.7 million.
So the premium here is not about condition, mileage or specification. It is about who owned it. Jordan’s car is a documented, verifiable piece of sporting history with a paper trail that runs from a North Carolina Ferrari dealer to a Chicago driveway to a Miami dealership’s forensic records search. That chain of evidence is what collectors are paying for, and it is becoming more valuable by the year.
John Temerian, founder of Curated, sees a broader shift at work. “You can see that generational shift happening,” he said. “The way people think about cars, memorabilia, and what is genuinely collectible is changing.”
He has a point. The same instinct that drives demand for a documented competition car with period race history now applies to a road car with a famous first owner, and the modern restomod scene shows how far a good story can carry a machine, as with the Revology Mustang Boss 302: The $400,000 Restomod That Outruns the Original.
The Wider Auction and the ‘Game-Used’ Car Trend
The Ferrari was not even the headline lot. Jordan’s “Last Dance” jersey, worn during the 1998 NBA Finals, sold in the same auction for $12,260,000. That landed within its $10 million to $15 million estimate and made it the most expensive jersey ever sold at auction.
Put the two results side by side and a pattern emerges. Collectors are paying extraordinary sums for objects that were genuinely used by the people who made them famous, rather than merely associated with them. Temerian has a term for it: “game-used” cars.
“You wonder how much time Jordan spent [in the 550 Maranello] thinking, decompressing, and preparing for what was ahead,” he said.
That is the emotional core of the sale. A jersey carries sweat and history. A car carries miles, wear on the seat bolsters, stone chips on the nose, and the knowledge that a man drove it to work on the days he was about to do something extraordinary. The custom seat rails are not a flaw. They are the proof.
What the Result Says About Ferrari Collecting
The sale lands in the middle of a strong year for the 550 Maranello. Low-mileage examples have been passing $500,000, a figure that would have seemed absurd a decade ago for a front-engined V12 GT that Ferrari built in relatively large numbers.
What Jordan’s car demonstrates is that documented celebrity history can rewrite the value of a modern classic entirely. The 550 Maranello was already climbing on its own merits: it is the car that brought Ferrari’s front-engined V12 grand tourer back after decades in the wilderness, and it is now old enough to be considered a genuine modern classic rather than a used exotic.
But provenance is the multiplier. A car with a famous first owner, a traceable history and a story worth telling is no longer competing with other 550 Maranellos. It is competing with memorabilia, with art, with anything a wealthy collector might want to own and show people.
Curated spent ten years chasing an incomplete chassis number on a forum to find this one. The car it uncovered has gone from a forgotten Ferrari in a California garage to one of the most talked-about auction results of the year.
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