Max Verstappen’s first proper calling card in Formula 1 has just slipped quietly into the collectors’ market — and, in doing so, it’s offered a neat snapshot of how quickly the sport revalues its own recent past.
The Toro Rosso STR10-02 chassis Verstappen drove through the bulk of his 2015 rookie campaign has been sold, with the deal understood to have landed in seven-figure territory. The car had been in private hands since it was purchased directly from Toro Rosso back in 2019, and it has now changed ownership again after being listed through F1 Authentics.
On paper, it’s “just” a mid-grid machine from a season that’s already a decade old. In reality, it’s a physical artefact of a moment F1 can’t recreate: Verstappen arriving as a 17-year-old, immediately operating at a level that made the paddock recalibrate what “ready” looked like. The sport has seen plenty of hyped rookies. It doesn’t often see someone who turns hype into inevitability.
The sale package itself reads like catnip for anyone who likes their memorabilia to feel less like a showroom prop and more like a preserved working object. Along with the chassis comes full documentation, including the original purchase paperwork from Red Bull Toro Rosso and a 60-page team-produced reference book that logs each race — with Verstappen’s comments included. There’s also a 2015-spec Renault power unit fitted, albeit with internal components removed, plus Verstappen’s original seat and steering wheel. An unworn 2015-spec Verstappen helmet was part of the bundle too.
That kind of provenance is increasingly what separates the serious end of the market from the merely expensive. Collectors don’t just want “an F1 car”; they want *the* car, with the paper trail and the story attached, and preferably with tactile items that feel close to the driver. STR10-02 ticks those boxes because it isn’t a vague representation of Verstappen’s rookie year — it’s the chassis he actually lived in, week to week, while the legend was still in draft form.
Toro Rosso built four chassis for 2015 for Verstappen and Carlos Sainz, now at Williams. Verstappen spent most of that season in STR10-02, racing it in 13 of the 19 grands prix and also using it in pre-season testing. His standout results that year — fourth places in Hungary and the United States — came in this car.
There’s also a distinctly F1-ish narrative wrinkle to it: Verstappen didn’t start the year in this chassis. He moved into STR10-02 for the remainder of the season after an accident with Romain Grosjean (then at Lotus) at Monaco. That detail matters in collector terms because it pins the car to the period when Verstappen’s rookie campaign settled into its rhythm — the stretch where his pace was no longer a curiosity, but a weekly problem for teams that were supposed to have more car than Toro Rosso did.
In 2026, Verstappen’s place in the sport’s modern hierarchy is already fixed. He’s a four-time world champion after that run of consecutive titles from 2021 to 2024, and his win tally sits on 71 — third on the all-time list, behind Lewis Hamilton (105) and Michael Schumacher (91). Those numbers obviously do the heavy lifting, but what keeps Verstappen’s early cars relevant is that his origin story is unusually clean: straight from being the youngest driver in F1 history at the 2015 Australian Grand Prix (17 years, five months and 13 days) to becoming a grand prix winner on his Red Bull debut in Spain the following season.
That trajectory is part of why a 2015 Toro Rosso can now command seven figures without anyone blinking. The market pays for beginnings, and Verstappen’s beginning is now loaded with meaning — because everything that followed came so fast, and so loudly.
It’s also worth noting how the top end of F1’s collector economy has shifted in the last few years. The gold standard remains the truly historic machinery: the 1954 Mercedes W196R Streamliner is still the most expensive F1 car ever sold at auction, having gone for $51.1m in 2025. More contemporary cars can still hit enormous numbers — like the 2013 Mercedes W04 from Hamilton’s first season with the team, which sold for $18.8m in 2023 — but Verstappen’s STR10-02 sits in a different, increasingly popular bracket: modern enough to feel familiar, old enough to be romantic, and tied to a driver whose career has already entered the “era-defining” category.
And the sport itself has been happy to lean into this. McLaren, unusually, auctioned its 2026 car — the MCL40 — months before it even turned a wheel in anger. That sale raised $11.4m, making it the sixth-most expensive F1 car to be sold at auction, with delivery scheduled for the first quarter of 2028 and a showcar of its title-winning 2025 machine provided in the interim.
Against that backdrop, a seven-figure Verstappen Toro Rosso doesn’t feel like a curiosity. It feels like the market doing what the market always does: chasing the point at which history stopped being potential and became fact.
One other detail doing the rounds will amuse anyone who’s ever clocked the way drivers hoard the meaningful pieces of their own past. Another STR10 — chassis 03, which Verstappen raced early in 2015 between Australia and Monaco — is believed to be owned by Verstappen himself, and it’s occasionally displayed in his fan shop in the Netherlands. Even when the rest of the world is bidding, the drivers usually keep one for themselves. They know which cars mattered before anyone else did.
In this case, STR10-02 mattered because it caught Verstappen at the only time he was ever just “the kid in the Toro Rosso” — right before the whole sport reoriented around him. That’s not just an old chassis. That’s a timestamp.
