A Formula 1 card just topped a Goldin weekly auction. Not a basketball card. Not baseball. Not football. A 2025 Topps Dynasty F1 Kimi Antonelli 1/1 Patch Autograph sold for $41,480 on March 26, beating out a Kobe Bryant Jambalaya ($21,960), a Victor Wembanyama 1/1 ($17,934), and a Shohei Ohtani/Yamamoto/Sasaki triple auto ($16,287).
F1 cards claimed 5 of the top 8 spots in the auction. That's not a fluke. That's a category shift.
$200,000 in Three Weeks
The March 26 sale was not even the biggest Antonelli number this month.
On March 14, a 1/1 Suit Zipper Jumbo Patch from the same Topps Dynasty set sold for $111,000 at Goldin's Elite Auction. On March 5, a 1/1 Gold Patch pulled 71 bids and closed at $51,240. Three auctions. Three different 1/1 configurations. Over $200,000 in total Antonelli spend in 21 days.
The March 26 auction also moved two copies of Antonelli's #1/2 Black Patch. One sold for $22,660. The other hit $19,764. Max Verstappen's Dynasty Patch (#2/5) went for $17,893. Isack Hadjar's Rookie 1/1 closed at $12,932.
These are not basketball numbers. But three years ago, these were not even numbers. F1 cards barely had a market.
The 19-Year-Old Leading F1
Kimi Antonelli is 19 years old. Born August 25, 2006, in Bologna. He's been a Mercedes junior driver since he was 12.
This season, he replaced Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes. He won the Chinese Grand Prix. Then he won the Japanese Grand Prix. Back-to-back. He leads the 2026 World Drivers' Championship with 72 points, 9 ahead of teammate George Russell.
He's the youngest championship leader in F1 history. The market is not speculating on potential. It's reacting to results.
The 77% Crash and What Came After
Topps entered F1 as the official licensee in 2020. Topps Chrome F1 debuted in 2021. And then the entire card market happened.
At the April 2021 peak, F1 card daily volume hit $22,390 on the secondary market. By 2024, it had collapsed to $2,952. A 77% decline. The Netflix-hype buyers left. The speculators moved on.
What's happening now is different. The recovery is driven by on-track performance, not hype cycles. Antonelli is winning races. Verstappen is still a dominant force.
The product is better. And the buyer pool has shifted from flippers to collectors who actually watch the sport.
Drive to Survive grew U.S. F1 fandom from 21% to 28% of adults. That audience is now old enough, engaged enough, and deep enough to support a real secondary market.
The foundation was not there in 2021. It is now.
The All-Time F1 Records
Antonelli's $111,000 sale is significant. But the all-time F1 card record belongs to Lewis Hamilton. His 2020 Topps Chrome Superfractor 1/1 sold for $900,000 in May 2022.
Max Verstappen's 2020 Chrome Superfractor Auto sits at $534,000.
Those were peak-market sales. They have not been retested at auction since. But Antonelli is 19. He's three races into his career. If he wins the championship this year, the $111,000 will look like a floor, not a ceiling.
Lando Norris's 1/1 Dynasty Gold Patch sold for $13,420 in January. Hadjar's 1/1 just went for $12,932. The depth of the market is building across multiple drivers, not just one name.
The Buy-In
A Topps Dynasty F1 hobby box costs roughly $1,200. For a single card. That's the buy-in for the high-end F1 product.
But the base market is a different story. Antonelli's base Topps Chrome rookie card is up 347% in 30 days, from $2 to $9.49.
That $2-to-$9 move is the real signal. It means casual collectors are entering the F1 card market, not just the whales chasing 1/1s at Goldin. The base is broadening.
F1 cards are still a fraction of the size of basketball or baseball. Topps has only been making them for six years. The population reports are thin. The census numbers are low.
For collectors who got priced out of the NBA and MLB card markets years ago, F1 offers something those markets don't anymore. A ground floor.
An F1 card just outperformed Kobe, Wemby, and Ohtani in a public auction. The hobby noticed.
