A scrum of smartly dressed, champagne-sipping car fans surround the $2.5m Hennessey Blackbird at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering.
The Quail is among the most-hunted tickets during Car Week on California’s Monterey Peninsula, which culminates in a Concours d’Elegance on the storied 18th fairway of Pebble Beach Golf Links.
A pair of Hennessey employees stand just offstage, their latest hypercar flashing a design inspired by the Lockheed SR71 Blackbird; the top-secret, Cold War-era spy plane that remains history’s fastest and highest-flying manned aircraft. Hennessey’s version might not do 2,100-mph at over 85,000 ft, but employees do have some hush-hush documents. Their red folders contain signed sales agreements for the Blackbird, whose 71 sales slots had dwindled to six prior to its reveal here. Wait, make that four.
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“We’ve sold two cars in just a few minutes since the unveiling,” divulges Nathan Malinick, the Texas-based automaker’s vice president of design, who’s among executives donning a Stetson for this 10-gallon occasion. “One customer saw the car for the first time, and decided on the spot to buy one.”
So much has changed here since 1950, when the first “concours” was a humble social gathering of about 30 sports cars. It was a side dish to perilous Pebble Beach Road Races that ran on public roads through area forests; before Laguna Seca Raceway was hastily built in response to the 1956 death of Ernie McAfee, a racer and Los Angeles Ferrari dealer, who crashed his Ferrari 121 LM into a tree.
This year’s unveilings, such as the fantastical, 1,578-horsepower Bugatti Destrier — a true one-of-one car, designed for a single buyer, with an unpublicized price that may exceed $10m — underscored the latest sea change here on the Pacific shores: Monterey Car Week has become ground zero for a booming business of newer, mega-priced hypercars and luxury cars.
“People are looking for cars that are unique, and companies are serving up great stuff to them,” says McKeel Hagerty, chief executive of classic-car insurer Hagerty, which also owns the Amelia Island Concours and Broad Arrow Auctions.
“We’re all having to learn the names of new brands,” Hagerty adds, with relative newcomers such as Czinger, Singer, Kimera, Zenvo, and Gordon Murray Special Vehicles all showing new cars with eight-figure price tags.
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As the market for so-called Pre-War classics has softened — the Gatsby-esque cars like Packards and Deusenbergs that still loom large over classic car shows — wealthy fans are acquiring more late-model cars they can actually drive and engage with, versus gathering dust in a static collection.
“Even the older collectors still want a seat at the table,” Hagerty says. “They don’t want the music to stop.”
A generational shift in wealth has dimmed the prospects for 80- or 100-year-old classics that, say, a Gen X or Millennial buyer might find stuffy, anachronistic, or unrelatable. Hagerty cites “liquidity events” for new generations of collectors — a successful IPO, the sale of a start-up — that are driving values of relatively new cars to unprecedented heights. As ever, flush collectors want what they want, and are willing to pay.
At Broad Arrow’s first-ever auction at The Quail, a Ferrari Enzo — a relative pup as a 2003 model — fetches the highest price of $10.7m. Second place? A three-year-old Bugatti Mistral trades hands for $8.8m.
“We’re selling some cars barely out of warranty for multiples of their original price,” says Hagerty, as nearby attendees queue up for coastal Hog Island oysters and caviar. (Food, some by international or Michelin-starred chefs, is part of The Quail’s draw).
At RM Sotheby’s auction in Monterey, a 2023 Ferrari SP3 Daytona, already on its second owner, trades hands for $17.8m. Ferrari built just 599 SP3’s, and allocated them to pre-selected collectors. Still, this was shocking appreciation for a Ferrari that sold new for about $2.4m.
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Monterey’s billionaire bazaar didn’t exist a few decades ago, when eight-figure showroom models like the 1990’s-era McLaren F1 or the 2000’s Bugatti Veyron were virtual unicorns. And those kinds of automotive fantasies reliably made debuts at traditional industry auto shows in cities like Geneva, Frankfurt, Los Angeles or New York. As those traditional convention-center shows have waned, Car Week has filled the void, along with the UK’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, with both events now ankle-deep in fanciful newer cars.
Fittingly, I watch as the 1996 McLaren F1 GTR, owned for 25 years by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, hammers for $31.5m at RM Sotheby’s sale. The groundbreaking McLaren, with its singular Pop Art paint scheme, becomes the most expensive British car ever sold at auction. Not to be outdone, a 2026 Ferrari Luce “Tailor Made” — remember, the scandalously designed EV that no Ferrari fan would be caught dead in? — draws $40m in a charity sale, making it the most-valuable new car ever sold at auction. Newer Ferraris, including the Luce, SP3, F50 and Enzo, account for six of the top 10 sales at Sotheby’s.
At the Koenigsegg stand, the innovative Swedish automaker was showing its CCGT1. The bewinged, $4m phantasm generates up to 1,600 horsepower when running corn-based E85 biofuel. Limited to 70 sold-out copies, the hypercar pays tribute to Koenigsegg’s ill-fated GT1 racer that was denied entry to Le Mans about 20 years ago, due to late-hour rule changes. Time certainly flies at Monterey: Christian von Koenigsegg founded his eponymous company in 1994 as a car-crazy 22-year-old. His speed-record-setting hypercars helped lay fertile ground for a proliferation of rivals. I ask von Koenigsegg what it’s like to go from industry rebel to the establishment.
“I don’t feel like the establishment,” von Koenigsegg says with a smile. “When I started out 32 years ago, we were told the sports car was dead. Porsche and Lamborghini were nearly bankrupt. But I still wanted to design cars, so we started our own.”
“We were definitely part of creating this niche.”
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Even-more-venerable brands, once content with selling $200,000 or $300,000 cars, aren’t about to let the upstarts have this lucrative business to themselves. Aston Martin showed the Valen, which rhymes with the “Halen” in Van Halen. And the Aston takes a more classic-rock approach, with an 838-hp, front-engine V-12 versus the midengine layouts typical of modern performers. Coming in the second quarter next year, the elegant Aston is limited to 150 copies, priced from $2m.
In the Monterey Peninsula’s gracious coastal locale — relatively sleepy when fabulous cars aren’t roaring through its streets for one week each year — automakers have taken to renting palatial homes to use as brand centers, design ateliers or clubhouses for favored clients. Automakers lure prospects and revelers, including some who could never afford their cars, with chef-driven meals, wine and whisky tastings, or other exclusive events
At the House of McLaren, perched on a steep hillside above the Pacific, I watch McLaren unveil its McL 6GT concept. The handsomely streamlined sports car is inspired by the M6GT that founder Bruce McLaren personally drove in the late ‘60s, and envisioned as the company’s first roadgoing model. That dream died when the New Zealander was killed at Goodwood in 1970 while testing a Cam-Am racer.
Like many competitors, McLaren is looking for ways to stand out from a high-priced herd. McLaren’s racing history and heritage is one way. Another is the McL 6GT’s manual transmission, with an exposed titanium linkage — a genuine stick shift that enthusiasts have clamored for, and that most sports-car makers have abandoned in favor of automated gearboxes.
Henrik Wilhelmsmeyer, McLaren’s chief commercial officer, says the House of McLaren is another way to forge that genuine connection with driving enthusiasts, and truly listen to and understand its customers. High-end brands, he says, abandoned traditional auto shows in part because there was no personal touch.
“The great thing about Car Week is having a high density of our audience in one place, whilst having the opportunity for exclusive time here,” he says.
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At the House of McLaren, customers can spec a car, enjoy intimate one-on-one time with executives or designers, or just hang out. With McLaren’s full range of models on hand — imagine the world’s richest frat house, including the $2.1m W1 — customers can bounce ideas with fellow enthusiasts or inspiration for their next car project.
“They all come together here for one week, united by their passion,” he says.
Mate Rimac has turned the passion and spotlight surrounding his pioneering all-electric Rimac hypercars into a mini-empire. The 38-year-old entrepreneur — Croatia’s cooler answer to Elon Musk — acquired a controlling stake in the storied Bugatti brand in 2021, when Volkswagen transferred Bugatti to Rimac and Porsche. His Rimac Bugatti company will help advance a new age of hybrid hypercars, including the roughly $4.5m Tourbillon.
Rimac says he drove the one-of-one Destrier along the California coast during Car Week. Here, younger car fans form paparazzi packs on seemingly every road, street or hotel lot to capture social videos of the latest cars. During my own rocketing drive of a McLaren 750S on California’s fabled Highway 1, to a southern terminus near Big Sur where the “Timber” wildfire had forced evacuations and cut off access, the kids show me their latest cheeky bit: Holding up Olympics-style placards to judge passing cars, on a 10-point scale. My yellow McLaren draws mostly 9’s and 10’s, but a few skeptical 7’s. It’s one drawback of Car Week, where a merely $450,000 McLaren can appear as common as a Toyota Camry.
Rimac’s Destrier, in comparison, is among the Faberge-rare models here that most people will never see again, least of all on a public road. At The Quail, Rimac says he let some young fans sit inside the Destrier during his coastal drive. Which surely earned him a “10.” Who knows: Some of those youngsters may find inspiration from that unexpected rendezvous with a visionary young automaker. Like his peers at Car Week, Rimac may be seeding the market for the next generations of bidders and buyers.
“We do think we’ve created a collectible item that will still be relevant at a Concours 30 years from now,” Rimac says.
