It’s the biggest week in the collector car calendar, with more events than we can keep up with, five auctions and tens of thousands of enthusiasts flooding the beautiful Monterey Peninsula, midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, writes Magneto magazine’s editorial director David Lillywhite.
The 2025 event was actually more than a week now, starting the previous Friday and finishing ten days later with the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. There was a time, less than ten years ago, when we were just about able to visit the majority of events and every auction. Now, that’s physically impossible, such has been the growth of Car Week.
Accommodation prices have gone stratospheric, too, so we’ve always tended to fly in from the UK on the Wednesday, missing the excellent Pre-Reunion at Weathertech Raceway and other events.
I left mid-morning UK time and arrived in San Francisco mid-afternoon US time – with another two hours eaten up crawling through immigration and collecting the rental car. Then it was a three-hour drive to Monterey, by which time it was the early hours of the morning UK time – but in Monterey, Hagerty’s vibrant Motorlux party and accompanying Broad Arrow auction were just kicking off at the Jet Center airport.
From there, I headed straight to the Pebble Beach Chairman’s Party; my first time there and easily my most exclusive and welcome invitation of the week. Then to the motel – basic but clean for the Car Week ‘special’ price of around $350 a night. By this point, even the most basic motels tend to have classic cars and modern supercars parked outside.
Early start on Thursday morning, aided by the typical 3:00am jetlag wake-up (great for catching up on emails and messages from the Magneto team in the UK). Then I was off to Pebble Beach before 7:00am for the start of the Tour d’Elegance – in my view the greatest free car event of Car Week, and possibly anywhere in terms of the quality of cars you’ll see.
The start is crowded and the tour leaves at 9:30am, so if you want a more relaxed morning then it’s better to find a vantage point somewhere along the 70-mile route, which takes in the Pacific Coast Highway and the stunning Big Sur and Bixby Bridge. Seeing so many of the world’s greatest cars in motion is spine-tingling.
For us, Thursday is then a chance to visit the Gooding (now neatly rebranded as Gooding Christie’s) preview, adjacent to the Tour start point, followed by RetroAuto and the forums at Pebble Beach – including a great discussion on how to save invaluable car artefacts, between the Petersen Automotive Museum’s Terry L Karges, Revs Institute founder and collector Miles Collier, multiple Pebble Beach winner Sam Mann and Hagerty head McKeel Hagerty.
After that I headed to Carmel to pick up tickets and attend media events, including the preview of the new Gordon Murray special projects. But if you’re on an easier schedule, there are several events taking place – including the low-key but charming Little Car Show in Pacific Grove.
Friday is always The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, but beware that the tickets are now more than $1500 each. Entry includes free food and beverages all day, if that helps… (A media ticket is crucial for us here). The classic car content is good but not to Pebble Beach standards: the highlights this year were displays for 30 years of F50 and 60 years of Iso Grifo, including the first and last made.
Really The Quail is now all about the top-end manufacturers releasing new models – Lamborghini, Touring, Czinger, Morgan, Hennessey, Singer, Meyers Manx, Tuthill, Maserati and more were all there, and successfully taking orders.
I awarded the Magneto Art of Bespoke trophy to Jim Utaski’s one-off Scaglione-designed 1959 Maserati 3500GT Bertone, while The Quail’s Best of Show rightly went to Art Zafiropoulo’s incredible 1996 Ferrari F50 GT1, as featured in Issue 26 of Magneto. Great to see Anne Brockinton Lee’s stunning Daimler Double Six gaining an award, too, 19 years after it took Best of Show at Pebble Beach.
Of the new cars, my favourite was the new collaboration between Tuthill and Meyers Manx. At the opposite end of the ever-growing event was a collection of restomods – some of them of dubious taste, but interesting all the same. Close by, a supercar area included a Vector W12, which was wonderful to see. Bonhams is a two-minute shuttle ride away and was worth seeing, too.
With more time, I’d have checked out the new event at Seaside’s Bayonet & Black Horse golf course, The Paddock, put on by Concorso Italiano’s new owners (using the same location and infrastructure). As it was, I missed it completely – but it sounds as though it’s a good, much cheaper alternative to The Quail.
Friday evening is auction time at Gooding Christie’s first. Then on to RM Sotheby’s in downtown Monterey – easily the glitziest of the sales, and a good place to view proceedings for free if you’re happy to stand outside. It’s worth paying to enter, though.
Saturday morning is always conflicting. If you have time, nip into the eclectic Dodi Auto Sales before heading to nearby Concours d’LeMons for the most relaxed, ridiculous event in Car Week, celebrating the very worst cars in existence. I was judging the Rueful Britannia class – the team with the broken down S-type, dressed in fluorescent lycra and with children’s magnetic lettering spelling out the Jaguar logo to emulate the company’s recent marketing campaign was the clear class winner.
And then back to the serious stuff: first Concorso Italiano (above), much recovered from last year’s disastrous event. In fact, better than it’s been for some years, with similar displays but improved catering and entertainment. There’s work to be done still, even if it’s just to liven up the atmosphere with a bit of music, but where else would you see double figures of Cisitalias?
Next, it’s finally up to Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca, the hottest, dustiest, noisiest place you’ll visit during Car Week. It’s a spectacular track, and facilities have been dramatically improved since being taken over by Friends of Laguna Seca. The racing was the best I’ve seen it: the IMSA and Group C race I watched was utterly spectacular, cheering Philip Kadoorie’s hard-fought win. I sweatily climbed up to the top of The Corkscrew for the TransAm race, which was well worth it.
The paddocks are all open access, too, so you’ll see the most remarkable selection of race cars of every type and age. This year the special central display was of 75 years of Formula 1 – and it was spectacular.
Off to Mecum to catch the end of the sale and to take a look at the only factory white 250 GTO, which will be offered at Mecum’s Kissimmee sale next year. Then back to RM Sotheby’s: if you’d been there for the $26m Ferrari Daytona SP3 on the Saturday night, you’d have experienced the best saleroom atmosphere of the week.
Sunday morning, and many will head to other events – but for me it has to be Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. No matter that it’s a mostly static show: this is one of the greatest car events in the world. It’s best to get an early start to Pebble Beach. I was there by 5:15am and the gates open at 5:30am. Then it’s straight to the Hagerty coffee and doughnuts stand, keeping eyes peeled for the Hagerty staff giving out the coveted Dawn Patrol caps – if you want to see millionaire car collectors scrabbling for a free hat, this is the place. I missed out, as usual, but that’s fine.
As the sun comes up, the cars start to drive in, each one greeted by Pebble Beach chairman Sandra Button. Usually it’s a cold and misty start, but for the first time that I can remember, this year’s Pebble Beach went straight to blue sky and remained like that all day. As ever, the quality of cars was off the scale and the special displays were, well, very special. The line-up of Land Rover expedition vehicles was a wonderful contrast to the 75 years of F1, 100 years of Invicta and cars of Virgil Exner displays, for example – and there was so much more.
Best of Class and special award winners begin to line up in the Winners’ Circle mid-afternoon, having been over the ramp to collect their trophies first. And then there’s a wait for the Best of Show contenders, the first sign of which is when they’re called to line up close to the stage. This year it was Philip Sarofim’s 1956 Maserati 200SI Fantuzzi sports racer, 1933 Invicta 4½ Litre S Type Corsica Drophead Coupé, 1939 Maybach SW38 Spohn Sport Zweisitzer, and Penny and Lee Anderson Sr’s 1924 Hispano-Suiza H6C Nieuport-Astra Torpedo.
A long pause. It would have been no less dramatic had we all been waiting for white smoke to rise from a chimney. And then the winner was announced – the Hispano-Suiza!
As ever, there are those who think that it should have been a post-war car, worried that Pebble Beach is becoming outmoded. At times I’ve agreed, but on this occasion I find it hard to argue with the choice: the H6C is a stunning and unique machine, beautifully restored and detailed by RM Restorations, with levels of intricacy that you just wouldn’t see on a later model. It’s spectacular.
And that’s it, save for a last party. For me, it was one of the best Monterey Car Weeks I’ve been to, with all the events I managed to visit improved upon over previous years. There were other obvious differences over past years, too, most evident on the roads around Pebble Beach, Monterey, Seaside, Carmel and Carmel Valley – hordes of kids, teenagers and young adults waiting for the cars, phones and cameras in hand, filming all the machinery, not just the recent vehicles.
It’s a new thing, at least in these volumes, and dispels the worries that Monterey Car Week is missing out on the younger generations (actually, the packed Supercars on Broadway, which I missed this year, is similarly refreshing in that way).
But there’s also a downside. This year, more than any other, there were convoys of supercars and heavily modified JDMs and BMWs noisily cruising up and down outside the events. Again, in many ways that’s a good thing, but some of the driving can best be described as anti-social, especially late at night on the narrow, winding 17 Mile Drive, where the residents and the wildlife live otherwise pampered lives. It was at best annoying; at worst dangerous and likely to set locals against Car Week. A drunk-driving incident and vandalism to two supercars in Carmel one evening were low points.
Despite that, Monterey Car Week is simply spectacular. It’s also more accessible to those of ‘normal’ income than you’d expect, with plenty of free events – and we’ve not even touched on the many one-make events, the free concours in Carmel or any of the other near-countless happenings in the area. If you haven’t been, book your accommodation early, a little outside of the central points of Carmel and Monterey, and experience it for yourself in 2026.
