The Coachella for car guys is upon us - Monterey Car Week 2026
Monterey Car Week is Coachella for car guys. I don't mean that as an offense - more as a fact I can't unsee anymore after years of attending. The 75th Pebble Beach Concours is this year's headline, and everyone on that lawn will tell you they came for something more refined than a festival. Sure. I believe them the way I believe anyone wearing a lanyard.
Lodging is its own punch in the face - book late, or just book normally, and you'll pay Four Seasons prices for a motel that would embarrass a highway rest stop the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Nobody apologizes for this. You'll pay it anyway.
To kick things off, you head to the Jet Center on Wednesday night to attend Motorlux, your dose of obnoxious for a year. The event bills itself as the VIP experience of the week, which it is, if your idea of VIP is a tent full of (wannabe) wealthy people standing near cars they cannot name. It has Hagerty's name on it now, presumably because the hobby needed yet another wristband and Hagerty to fulfill their mission of ‘Saving driving for future generations’. In the middle of private security and helicopter vendors. Sure.
If you survive Motorlux and the five Martinis you drawn yourself into that night, you pass to the next level and the part I actually find interesting - the auctions. Five houses, something like a thousand cars changing hands within a mile of each other over four days. Bonhams does its single-day sale out at Laguna Seca, RM Sotheby's and Mecum both run three days, Broad Arrow does two at The Quail, and Gooding Christie's two as well, just in front of the Concours entrance. It's a circus, and everyone in the room knows it, or thinks they do - dramatic lighting, dramatic announcements, reserves getting worked on from the podium like nobody's supposed to notice and people clapping at cars that actually failed to sell. The good auctioneers know exactly what show they're running and people are here for the interactive aspect of it. Friendly reminder for those not used to go to auctions - do not waive at your friends on the other side of the room when the top lot is going under the hammer.
It is Saturday night. You’ve drank yourself through the week, avoided a few car crashes with 19 years old revving their way through the peninsula with their M3s, and dodged a few car-spotters running under your wheels to capture half the wheel of a Carrera GT they saw from afar. Which was actually a Boxster, so never mind. Everyone is chasing a clip rather than a car and you need to be aware of it. Anyways, you’re ready for the final stage - the Concours.
Getting onto the lawn itself is its own challenge. You don't park anywhere near it - you park fifteen minutes away and get funneled onto a city bus, standing shoulder to shoulder with forty other men in linen suits and Rolexes. All of you are sweating through your jackets, holding a rail meant for a commuter route, on your way to see cars worth more than the bus company's entire fleet. Just a great reminder that the $650 ticket is indeed, General Admission.
If you woke up early enough, a time where you actually considered not going to bed the night before, you scramble through the fog to attend the Dawn Patrol. This prestigious and intimate moment of the concours used to mean something specific - the early arrivals, the good light, cars rolling onto the lawn before the official gates open, the closest thing left to seeing the show the way judges do. But it isn't much of a secret anymore. Half the people at dawn isn't there for the cars - they are after the free Hagerty hat, like uncaffeinated zombies. A fair number of which hats land on eBay before the gates even open to people who decided to sleep. Watching grown men scramble for the same cap has the exact energy of a candy toss at a parade, except the candy is polyester and somebody's turning a profit on it by lunch. And it is kids.
Eventually the Concours scene actually gets in motion and to this point you’re brain tells you you are at a zoo, not so much at a Concours anymore. The people watching is great though, so it is worth it. Casa Ferrari is the star of the show - a roped-off stage within the festival, a rotating cast of nepo babies running content rounds in front of red cars they couldn't identify if their lives depended on it. Finance bros orbit in loose packs, comparing watches louder than the engines idling nearby, treating the most prestigious concours on earth like a slightly grander version of the Golf club they usually network at. Nobody's technically doing anything wrong. That’s just the evolution of the hobby.
Same instinct behind what I think of as the F40 problem - the Carrera GT works just as well, so take your pick. Stand near either car long enough and a hundred people stop for the photo, because everyone knows what it is and wants the same picture everyone else is getting. Two rows over, the one-off coach-built car that's actually rare, actually significant, actually the reason a concours exists in the first place gets barley any look. The cars are still the best in the world. But fewer and fewer of the people looking at them can tell famous from rare, and fewer still seem bothered by not knowing.
So you leave the concours. It’s 11am, which is arguable early, but you’ve already been here for 5 hours (remember the Hagerty Hat), so you are done. But that’s when you can actually get to the arguably best part of the week - the Laguna Seca racetrack. The Rolex Motorsports Reunion, is - and I say this a little confused myself - the calmest, most genuine stretch of the whole ten days. Cars are actually being driven hard, not trailered in for a photo. People are there to watch something go through the Corkscrew, not to be photographed next to it. No shuttle, no hat scrum, no Motorlux. Just V8s echoing off a hillside and a crowd that mostly knows what it's looking at. Nobody markets that part too loud and it’s probably better this way.
All of this leads to the same observation I made a few months back. The large Concours are becoming Festivals and cash machines. Smaller Concours are where things happen if you are truly coming for the cars. Monterey's still the biggest stage in the hobby, still where the real price discovery happens - five houses in one week, no way around that. But most of the actual business done up there happens well before any of this - Tuesday, Wednesday, preview rooms, before the wristbands go on and before anyone's thinking about the photo. The lawn on Sunday is the show. The deals get made days earlier, quietly, by people who came for the cars and usually left before the headline went on.
God Save the Wheels
