Dallara sends its only single seat MPS to the Monaco auction
Dallara will consign the only completed Macchina Posto Singolo prototype to RM Sotheby’s Monaco sale on 25 April. With its central driving position, carbon fibre monocoque and 2.3 litre turbo engine producing 400bhp, the car reworks the Stradale idea into something more pointed, bringing track car logic, road legality and collector appeal together in a single machine.
RM Sotheby’s values the 2024 Dallara MPS at more than €700,000 and will offer it without reserve. The deal carries extra weight for two reasons. The auction house is waiving the buyer’s premium for this lot, and Dallara will direct the full proceeds to the Caterina Dallara Foundation, which the family set up in 2021 to support social and cultural development in the Val Ceno region.
Technically, the MPS is rooted in the Dallara Stradale, the car that took the company into the world of series production road cars for the first time in 2015. The Stradale’s official figures give this story a solid frame: 855kg dry weight, 400bhp, 500Nm and a 2.3 litre turbocharged engine compliant with Euro 6e regulations. The MPS uses the same basic powertrain logic and the same six speed automated gearbox, but pushes the whole package a step further by stripping away anything that diluted the connection between driver and machine.
At the heart of the project sits one decisive move. The engineers placed the car’s only seat in the middle. According to Dallara and RM Sotheby’s, the MPS took shape during the restrictions of 2020 under the direction of Giampaolo Dallara and a small team of specialists. The central layout heightens the driver’s role, reduces the frontal area and helps the aerodynamics work more efficiently. The same idea forced the team to compress the cockpit so tightly that there was no room for a conventional gear selector, leaving paddle shifts on the steering wheel to do the job.
This is the point where the MPS stops being merely a curiosity and starts to look like a market signal. Dallara is not a luxury brand in the classic sense. It is a highly specialised engineering house that sells the world vehicles, aerodynamics and racing expertise. The MPS distils all of that into a single collectible object. It is a one off, it is road homologated, it is tied directly to the company’s competition heritage and it comes with a charitable purpose attached. Taken together, that suggests Dallara is testing more than the market’s appetite for rarity. It is also testing whether buyers are ready to value an engineering led brand in the same way they value the old guard of exclusive marques.
In design terms, the MPS echoes the company’s first sports car, the SP1000, but strategically it carries a much newer message. Dallara is showing that a small manufacturer can use its road legal model platform as a demonstration tool, shaping reputation, collector interest and philanthropic impact at the same time. If the hammer falls at more than €700,000, or higher still, the sale will underline a shift that has been building for some time: today’s top collectors are increasingly buying into story, technical honesty and original architecture, not just a familiar badge on the nose.
