A 1963 Matbro Mastiff sold for £86,100 (€101,315) at Cheffins’ vintage auction on Saturday, April 22, in Sutton, England.
The classic tractor smashed its guide price of £40,000 (€47,000), making it a UK record price at auction for a vintage tractor.
Over 4,000 people were reportedly in attendance; buyers came from across the UK and abroad, including Germany, the USA, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Sudan.
The most recent vintage sale saw one of the highest consignments of vintage and classic tractors ever recorded, in terms of value and quality. The sale of over 260 lots amounted to over £1.135m (€1.335m), according to UK selling agents Cheffins.
The first four tractors alone achieved a hammer price of £190,500 (€224,163) within the starting ten minutes.
Following the 1963 Matbro Mastiff was a Lanz Bulldog D9550 crawler tractor; it sold for £75,600 (€88,959) to a buyer from Germany. A 1957 David Brown crawler tractor achieved £63,000 (€74,133), which are both record prices for these types.
Also on offer was a ‘virtually untouched, rare’ County 954 Super-Six which was discovered on a county council farm in Hertfordshire.
Dating back to the 1960s, the Super-Six also surpassed its guide price of £12,000 (€14,120); selling for £19,500 (€22,946).
A County SuperSix dating back to the 1960s
The sale also included a collection of steam engines, with the most important example being a 1918 pair of John Fowler Ploughing Engines known as ‘Horsa and Hengist’, which were sold to a collector for a total for £147,000 (€172,976).
One of the John Fowler Ploughing Engines
It was an honour to sell some of the world’s rarest and highest-value classic tractors, Chairman at Cheffins, Bill King, said.
“We saw buyers from all over the world, with some travelling from as far away as New Zealand and Australia to see these machines being sold.
The prices achieved were second-to-none and this really goes to show how vintage machinery continues to be one of the most popular alternative investment types in the UK.
“Rarity was the order of the day, with the least common models smashing UK records for prices paid,” King said.
