There’s a particular kind of gravity to the cars that mark a driver’s “before” and “after”. Michael Schumacher’s Benetton B192 isn’t just another early-’90s F1 survivor with a nice coat of teal-and-yellow nostalgia — it’s the chassis that carried him to the first win of what became a 91-victory career.
That history came with a price tag this week. The Rory Byrne-designed B192-05, the machine Schumacher drove to victory at the 1992 Belgian Grand Prix, has sold at auction for €5,082,000 (around £4.4m) via Broad Arrow Auctions.
In pure numbers, it’s an eye-catching sale. In context, it’s slightly more curious. Pre-sale estimates had the car pegged north of €8.5m, and yet the hammer fell a long way short of that. Not a flop — far from it — but a reminder that the collectors’ market can be as sensitive to timing and mood as it is to provenance.
Still, provenance doesn’t get much cleaner than this: the first win, at Spa, in a race that helped cement the early outline of Schumacher’s reputation. Williams had been the reference in 1992, with Nigel Mansell so dominant the title was wrapped up with five races still to run. At Spa, Mansell started on pole, Schumacher lined up on the second row, and the Ardennes weather did what it always does — turn certainty into a moving target.
Schumacher spent much of the afternoon circulating in third as conditions shifted. Then came the decisive read: having burned through his wet tyres, he gambled on slicks at the right moment, found grip sooner than those ahead, and undercut Mansell as the track dried. Mansell’s late engine trouble took away the possibility of a proper chase, and Schumacher disappeared up the road to win by 36 seconds. It wasn’t the closest finish, but it was a statement in racecraft — the sort that makes a future narrative feel inevitable.
The B192-05 itself ran in five races during that 1992 season. And crucially, it’s not a car that’s been passed around the public market for decades. Benetton kept hold of it, and it later sat within the Renault Classic collection — meaning this was the first time it had been publicly sold. That sort of clean chain of custody is catnip to serious buyers, the ones who want a museum piece rather than a refurbishment project with a fuzzy backstory.
The final price also puts the result in an interesting bracket historically. At €5.082m it lands just outside the all-time top 10 most expensive F1 cars sold at auction — a list that, unsurprisingly, has plenty of Schumacher’s Ferrari-era machinery in it. The most expensive Schumacher-driven car to change hands at auction remains the Ferrari F2001 that won the Monaco Grand Prix, which fetched £13.43m in Monte-Carlo in 2025 and sits fourth on that all-time list.
It’s also telling when you compare it to another Schumacher Benetton that sold far more cheaply: a B191 from 1991 went under the hammer in Miami last year for $775,000 (about £570,000). Same driver, similar era, similar visual romance — and a completely different outcome. The difference is simple: one is “a Schumacher car”. The other is *the* car that began the winning.
So why didn’t this one punch through its estimate? There’s no single answer in a market like this, but the result hints at how collectors sort their own internal hierarchy. First wins matter, but the modern apex of desirability still leans heavily towards title-winning hardware and the peak red-car years. Spa ’92 is the origin story; Monaco ’01 is the legend in full colour, with the brand power of Ferrari and a championship narrative baked into the carbon.
And yet, five million euros for the chassis that launched one of F1’s defining careers feels, if not a bargain, then at least a rational price for something genuinely irreplaceable. Plenty of race-winning cars exist. Very few are the ones that turned a talented young driver into a Grand Prix winner in front of Senna, Mansell and Häkkinen on a day when the sport’s old and new worlds briefly overlapped on the same strip of tarmac.
In 2026, with Formula 1 living in a new regulatory era and its history increasingly curated, packaged and sold — sometimes literally — the appetite for iconic artefacts isn’t going away. If anything, the story attached to the object is becoming the object.
And this one has a story collectors can tell in a single sentence: the first win, at Spa, before there were 90 more.
