The confetti cannons fired as owners Lee and Penny Anderson were presented the Best of Show trophy by Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Chairman Sandra Button. The swirling bits of colored paper marked the culmination of Monterey Car Week, the largest car-enthusiast celebration in the world.
On Sunday, August 21, their 1932 Duesenberg Model J Figoni Sports Torpedo went home with the coveted trophy.
This year marked a return to the “old normal” of pre-pandemic life. There was a release of pent-up demand for attending events, for seeing friends, for showing cars and buying and selling them. If you had an interest in cars, from futuristic concept cars to vintage Bugattis, you were in your happy place. It was a non-stop frenzy.
This issue is full of detailed descriptions by our on-site analysts of the sales that led to a record-breaking total. Over $467.2m was realized, with more than 1,000 cars offered, comfortably surpassing the previous record of $463.7m set in 2014.
In a different time
The first Rick Cole Monterey Auction of sports and racing cars was held in 1986. SCM has been at the Portola Inn (now the Portola Hotel & Spa) covering the action every year since.
Through 2019, I never missed a year or an event. I recall the first Christie’s auction, a dismal affair. Then there was the excitement of the first Gooding & Company auction, held after the Sunday concours. We all dragged ourselves up the hill for a final glass of champagne and to look at cars one more time.
The Rick Cole sale became the Blackhawk World Classic auction, and it was in turn replaced by RM Auctions (now RM Sotheby’s). Soon enough, Bonhams joined the fray. Then Mecum set up its tents, and this year the newly formed Broad Arrow Auctions threw its hat into the ring.
The Quail made a splashy entrance. SCM also launched the first-ever collector seminars of the Monterey Week.
During this time, I was emcee for Concorso Italiano and Legends of the Autobahn. In this era, I also emceed the morning activities at Pebble.
Over the years, what was once just the Monterey Historics and the Pebble Beach Concours has become a weeklong orgy of all things automotive.
The Peninsula Classics Best of the Best Award has now become the unofficial start of the week.
McCall’s Motorworks Revival has morphed into Hagerty’s Motorlux.
The 734-mile view
This year I watched Monterey from afar, from SCM World Headquarters in Portland.
The biggest change in the past 35 years has been the advent of social media, and the increasing accessibility to everything happening.
Exclusive high-end parties? On Instagram. Concept-car reveals? Facebook. A Ferrari sells for $22m? Watched it on the livestream.
At one point, I had four devices simultaneously feeding my insatiable quest for information. At the same time, there were non-stop beeps from my phone, iPad and laptop announcing the arrival of new texts, photos and emails from the SCM gang and friends on-site.
Looking towards next year, I wonder how the SCM team, led by Executive Editor Jeff Sabatini, would feel about my asking them to wear body cams as they race from event to event?
While just over 1,000 cars crossed the block in Monterey at traditional live auctions, Bring a Trailer was listing another 100 cars or more per day. Add that to the cars offered by Cars & Bids, The MB Market, Hemmings Auctions, PCarMarket and other online players, and that’s another 1,000 cars we could have been tempted to buy during the week. Two-thousand cars on offer in seven days, with nearly all of them sold.
All the big auction companies are scrambling to understand and adapt to their lower-cost competition. Bonhams has even directly joined the online fray with its acquisition of The Market last year. There are great rewards waiting for the traditional auction houses that find the appropriate way to increase transparency and grow user involvement.
If they play it right, combining the best of online techniques with their unmatched in-person presentations will allow them to maintain their formidable high-end-market-dominating presence.
Gone by Tuesday
As a social-media event, Monterey Car Week has become predictably transitory and ephemeral. Hashtags have replaced thoughtful commentary. As all-encompassing and constant as the posts were during the week, equally deafening was the silence by the following Wednesday.
All of the Instagram, Twitter and Facebook influencers and their followers had moved on to something else. The frunk of the EV Bronco became the topic of the moment.
In this moment of quiet, the gang of experts at SCM distill and decant the essence of the week and offer it to you in a thoughtful way in this issue.
I can safely pronounce that the collector-car world has never had more participants of all ages, more cars being bought and sold in all price ranges, and more exposure to millions of enthusiasts all over the world.
It’s the dawn of a new era for car enthusiasts, and the future looks promising indeed. ♦