Monterey Car Week Welcomes All
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Things can get weird for regular car fans at Monterey Car Week, who can feel like imposters among the billionaires, engaged in highly conspicuous consumption. Show up in, say, a BMW 3-Series, and you’re a dingy in a sea of Bugattis and Bentleys.
Yet from Pebble Beach’s Pacific splendor to satellite events like the Concours d’LeMons — born as a friendly middle finger to the engraved-invitation end of Monterey — Car Week is lightening up and becoming more inclusive. A Festivus for the rest of the enthusiast world too, including the recent phenomenon of younger enthusiasts Instagramming and YouTubing every last Lamborghini or Crayola-colored Michael Fux Rolls. Hell, supercar mishaps are becoming an annual rite, like last year’s McLaren-bus crackup, with attendant speeding crackdowns.
Standing six-foot-seven in an ironic blue blazer, Alan Galbraith — founder and “Head Gasket” of Concours d’LeMons — was easy to spot on the field at Seaside City Hall, the crabgrass to Pebble Beach’s manicured lawn.
“We try to keep this event free of charge,” Galbraith says. “That way you get what you pay for.”
Roughly 100 hoopties vied for the coveted Worst of Show award, and this year’s was a doozie: “Buttercup” is a 1971 Lincoln Town Coupe transmogrified into a kind of taxidermy horse that kids happily mounted for photos, and what appears to be disgusting carpet for horsehide.
LeMons’ competitive categories included Most Combustible Car and Rust Belt American Junk; in the latter, an AMC Pacer wagon caught the eye of this native Detroiter and former Gremlin driver. An orange Bricklin sat in the exact spot where it died while being driven onto the show field.
Galbraith smiles at the suggestion that LeMons, now in its 15th year, has become part of the Car Week establishment. These sheetmetal sell-outs even have a watch sponsor, with Oris gifting an (affordable) Swiss watch to Worst of Show. But 33 years ago, this former music engineer felt out of place on Pebble’s fabled 18th fairway, a party crasher dressed in ripped jeans and snakeskin boots.
“I came in the back way, saw no security guards and thought, ‘I could drive a Pinto wagon out here and no one would stop me,’” Galbraith recalls. “Years later, with that idea of a Pinto at a nice car show, I could finally make that happen.”
LeMons started as a bit of a joke, “but then we realized it was bigger than that,” Galbraith said. “Pebble is rightfully the most prestigious car show in the world, but it had gotten a little stodgy and serious. We gave a home to a lot of cars and folks that didn’t have a place here.”
From some angles, the main event, the 73rd annual Pebble Beach Concours d'Élégance, was as upper-crusty as ever. A royal assemblage of 10 Defenders and Range Rovers employed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had these Pacific Coast fairways looking like an episode of The Crown. Show curators and judges say the charming “brass cars” and great pre-war classics — your Rolls-Royces, Pierce-Arrows, Delahayes, and Duesenbergs — will always have a place of honor here. Since the first Concours in 1950, only one postwar car has earned Best of Show, a 1954 Ferrari 375 MM coupe that bested 216 rivals in 2014.
But Sandra Button, Concours chairman, said the show is naturally evolving as new generations are drawn to the cars they grew up admiring. Button invoked another royal to insist people have got it all wrong about Pebble Beach.
“From afar, we might seem like the Queen Mary, very stuffy and steaming along, but it isn’t like that,” Button says. “The show is very organic and driven by the passion of people in the car hobby.”
Button reminds us the Concours, first held in 1950, is nearly as old as the Ferrari brand itself, so it took a while before postwar cars were old enough for inclusion. And those postwar cars now make up a solid majority, a balance that tipped for good in 2019. Among the 214 show cars on display, roughly 50 were transported here from outside the U.S., and 1898 Mors was the oldest. The newest was a 2023 Asso de Piche concept, a modern update of Italdesign’s 1973 wedge car (also on display) that influenced Audi’s showroom designs of the Eighties.
“So there’s a 125-year span of cars on the field, and that shows the breadth of what Pebble can do,” Button says. “The balance is shifting, and that’s a reflection of the people entering.”
Ken Gross, the auto journalist and eminent concours and museum curator, helped assemble this year’s spectacular group of One-Off Wedge Concept Cars. The sight of these cars, with most hailing from the Swinging Seventies, was akin to a disco ball spinning in the Concours’ traditional ballroom. Out-there specimens included the Ferrari Modulo 512 (owned by Jim Glickenhaus), Lancia Stratos HF Zero, and Alfa Romeo Carabo. Another show group highlighted BPR race cars and FIA GT cars. BPR put supercars into track competition in the Nineties, the kind of cars that adorned teenage bedrooms not so long ago: The Ferrari F40 and McLaren F1, Bugatti EB110, and Mercedes CLK GTR.
That wedge class, Gross notes, included a pair of concepts from Japan, a nation whose typically mainstream-focused cars are usually relegated to outer parking lots.
The Pininfarina-designed HP-X was Honda’s first concept car, the star of the 1984 Turin Auto Show, and a car that set the stage for the NSX supercar. Talk about a revolution: The HP-X (for “Honda Pininfarina eXperimental”) became the first car from a Japanese automaker in over 50 years to be featured on Pebble’s competition field.
“The Concours can’t stay rooted in the past,” Gross says. “Times, tastes, and people evolve and change. But if there’s a common denominator, it’s that Pebble Beach always wants to display the best cars of every genre.”
Gross has now helped curate several car classes that depart from tradition, including hot rods, Mercury customs, Tatras, Tuckers, and the Porsche 917.
Sunday’s Concept Lawn, which is open to the public, has also become a highlight for the democratic pastime of ogling cars that normal folks can never afford. Showgoers crowded around everything from a rainbow-striped, 1986 Galpin Motors bb Porsche 911 Hybrid and Sacrilege Motors 911 EV to a Rimac Nevera N, Lucid Gravity, and BMW’s 2025 M5 sedan and Touring wagon.
And for the first time in Concours history, a preservation car, rather than a meticulously restored classic, was awarded Best of Show: A 1934 Bugatti Type 59, brought here from Zug, Switzerland.
Personally, nothing at Car Week makes me feel more like the hired help than the annual auctions, especially when bidding wars break out over multi-million-dollar rides. Hagerty estimates $459 million worth of cars traded hands, with bidders closing deals on roughly 80 percent of 1,200 cars that crossed the block, at an average hammer price of $430,000.
For every regular Joe or Jane who leaves auctions empty-handed in an Uber, the consolation is downing champagne and hors d’oeuvres at Car Week parties. Once again, it was impossible to miss the crush of younger people, jostling for entry to parties hosted by Lamborghini, Bentley, Mercedes, and others.
“Pebble has always been a bit of a lifestyle event, and attendance by a younger, affluent crowd has gone up significantly,” Galbraith says.
If the velvet rope won’t budge, the streets of Monterey or Carmel remain open to all comers. Enthusiasts gathered along local streets and in parking lots to document what is surely the world’s biggest concentration of hypercars and supercars. Hot spots include the Inn at Spanish Bay, where valets line up so many Paganis, Bugattis, and Lamborghinis that you’d be forgiven for assuming that every California traveler drives a supercar on vacation.
“There are gaggles of people waiting to take pictures of supercars, and that’s a relatively new phenomenon,” Galbraith says.
Those newer cars, some in psychedelic colors, serve as a powerful gateway drug for younger audiences.
“I always take issue with people saying the health of the car hobby is waning,” Galbraith says. “Younger people may come for the Lambos, but they’re being exposed to Cobras or Packards.”
“There are new ‘old guys’ being minted every day,” Galbraith adds. “As enthusiasts age and get larger bank accounts, some of them will be able to afford these classics.”
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