Where an auction house is not 100% convinced that a lot will sell, it's customary for them to provide a "come and get me" estimate where the lower end of the range is below, sometimes significantly below, what they think the lot will actually reach. That wasn't the case here, so I presume there must have been some confidence that the lots would move.

The Carrera was nice, but I saw it around one third of the higher estimate really. That's from a European perspective, where the Sunray badging is not that important or evocative to me and also from the perspective of a collector who is not that keen on these branded models, so that does affect my feel for the price but it seems that the US market didn't entirely disagree.

As for the dash timers, I can only think that they looked at what the McQueen Monaco achieved in the recent Antiquorum sale and assumed that any item connected to "Le Mans" would make the same sort of premium. Yes, Steve McQueen is cool but it takes a lot of cool and a very strong provenance link to make those $60k's worth of cool.

I don't really know where those estimates came from. The estimates for UK sales are much more reasonable - in some cases, maybe pessimistic even, a red Silverstone head is down for £1000-£1500 only in the upcoming Knightsbridge auction.