This classic starter flag for the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans sold for £339k

Here’s a little piece of history that sold for a big price. The starter flag for the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans sold last weekend for a whopping €396,000 (£338,877).

What will presumably now become a superb piece of wall art was used in the ’65 edition, the first time Le Mans was broadcast live to the USA. And as was customary back in ye olden days, the tricolore was waved to let the drivers sprint over to their cars in the famous ‘Le Mans start’.

Now of course, they thunder across the line in rolling formation set to Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. And the Rocky IV soundtrack.

Those with a whipcrack internet connection will discover the 1965 race was the last time Ferrari won overall. The Scuderia in fact scored a 1-2-3 finish, with Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt’s Ferrari 250 LM taking the top spot.

Their names, along with the other two Ferraris that locked out the podium, have been scrawled in white font at the bottom of the flag’s display case, which – explains RM Sotheby’s rather helpfully – “is perfect to hang on the wall of a garage (perhaps next to one of the 1965 entries)”.

Because if you’re spending the equivalent of, say, a Ferrari Purosangue on a little flag, chances are you’ll have a big car next to it.