Monterey Car Week 2026 runs from Friday, August 7 to Sunday, August 16, with the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance closing the week on the final Sunday. It is the most important ten days on the collector car calendar — and this year’s edition is shaping up to be historic.
Monterey Car Week 2026 is already underway. The opening weekend kicked off with a free downtown celebration in Monterey and two days of vintage racing at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, before the marquee concours and auction days arrive August 12–16. But the real fireworks are still ahead.
Here’s what actually matters this week — and why the ripple effects of Monterey Car Week 2026 will hit the exotic car market long after the fog lifts off the Peninsula.
Monterey Car Week 2026 takes place August 7–16 across California’s Monterey Peninsula, headlined by the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on Sunday, August 16. Highlights include the largest gathering of Lamborghini Miuras ever assembled — celebrating the model’s 60th anniversary on Pebble Beach’s 3rd fairway — plus hypercar debuts at The Quail on August 14 and five auction houses selling nine figures of collector cars August 13–15.
| Date | Event | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 7–9 | Monterey Kickoff & Pre-Reunion racing | Free downtown celebration; vintage racing warms up Laguna Seca |
| Aug 12–15 | Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion | Hundreds of historic race cars at WeatherTech Raceway |
| Aug 13 | Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance | Concours entrants drive public roads — free to watch |
| Aug 13–15 | Auction week | Bonhams, RM Sotheby’s, Broad Arrow, Mecum, Gooding Christie’s |
| Aug 14 | The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering | The week’s biggest concentration of debuts and reveals |
| Aug 15 | Concours d’Lemons & Exotics on Broadway | The people’s counter-programming |
| Aug 16 | 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance | Best of Show — and the record Miura display |
A note on how to read that schedule: the week builds deliberately. The early days belong to enthusiasts — open paddocks, approachable racing, free street events. By Thursday the tone shifts as the auction previews open and the money arrives.
Friday is industry day at The Quail, Saturday belongs to the racing faithful at the Reunion, and Sunday is the crescendo at Pebble Beach. Plan around that arc and Monterey Car Week 2026 makes sense; fight it and you’ll spend the week in traffic wondering where everyone went.
Monterey Car Week 2026 opened exactly as promised. Friday’s free Kickoff brought roughly thirty historic race cars — and their drivers — to Alvarado Street in downtown Monterey, and more than 300 historic racers ran practice and qualifying at the Pre-Reunion weekend at Laguna Seca. The Corkscrew Hillclimb returned too, with the 29.5-second record set in 2025 by Christine Sloss’s Ferrari SF90 XX Spider still standing as the mark to beat.
The debut calendar is also firming up. BMW confirmed two North American concept premieres: the fully electric, quad-motor M Concept Neue Klasse arrives Thursday at the House of M downtown before joining the Reunion paddock, and the Vision BMW ALPINA — the first concept ALPINA has shown under BMW ownership — takes its bow at The Quail on Friday morning. Both concepts join the lawn at Pebble Beach on Sunday. Add Bugatti’s already-revealed Destrier, and the reveal season of Monterey Car Week 2026 is officially open. We’ll update this page again after Best of Show and the final auction numbers land.
Anniversaries at Pebble Beach usually mean a few commemorative classes, but Monterey Car Week 2026 is different — the 75th is a milestone. Since the first Concours in 1950, the event has grown from a small social gathering beside a road race into the single most influential arbiter of automotive beauty on Earth — the show where restoration budgets are measured in millions and a class win rewrites a car’s provenance forever.
For its diamond anniversary, the Concours is assembling special 75th-anniversary classes celebrating past Best of Show winners alongside its usual fields, and the fairways will carry more automotive history per square foot than anywhere on the planet. The stakes are real: a Best of Show win at Pebble can add millions to a car’s value overnight — and elevate its owner’s standing among collectors just as much.
And for the first time during Concours week, Pebble Beach Golf Links is opening its 3rd fairway for something no one has seen before.
Context makes the anniversary land harder. The first Pebble Beach Concours in 1950 was a sideshow to a road race through the Del Monte Forest — a social afternoon where fewer than thirty cars parked on a lawn. The race ended after a fatal crash in 1956; the lawn became the main event.
Since then, Pebble Beach has crowned the restorations that define connoisseurship itself, from prewar Alfa Romeo 8Cs and Duesenberg SJs to the coachbuilt Bugattis and Delahayes that trade hands today for eight and nine figures. Winning Best of Show remains the single most valuable sentence in a collector car’s history file. That is the institution turning seventy-five during Monterey Car Week 2026 — and it explains why the week commands the private jets, the auction tents, and the attention of every serious collector on Earth.
The headline act of Monterey Car Week 2026 is a Lamborghini-curated display celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Miura — expected to be the largest gathering of Miuras ever assembled, surpassing the model’s own 40th and 50th anniversary reunions. Concours President Vince Finaldi put it plainly: this August, the power of Pebble will assemble the world’s largest gathering of Miuras ever.
Think about what that means. The Miura is the car that invented the mid-engine supercar template. Every Aventador, every Revuelto, every modern V12 flagship traces its DNA to that transverse-V12 wedge from 1966. Bertone’s masterpiece was so far ahead of its time that Ferrari didn’t answer it for years — and when the display fills the 3rd fairway with arancio, verde, and giallo examples against the Pacific, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime photograph waiting to happen.
Expected highlights include early P400 Bertone coupés from 1967–68 alongside the ultimate SV specification of 1971 — the bookends of a five-year production run that changed everything. Lamborghini has framed the celebration as the centerpiece of its Monterey presence this year, and Miura owners worldwide have been quietly shipping cars to California for months.
Watch the market, too. Anniversary gatherings of this scale have a track record of repricing a model: if the Miura celebration does what everyone expects, don’t be surprised if classic Lamborghini values get a visible bump by September.
It is hard to overstate what happened when the Miura appeared in 1966. Ferruccio Lamborghini’s young engineers — Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani were in their twenties — turned the racing world’s mid-engine layout into a road car, and Marcello Gandini at Bertone wrapped it in a body that still stops rooms.
The formula it invented — engine behind the driver, beauty as standard equipment, scarcity as strategy — is the entire template the exotic market runs on today. Every limited-run hypercar unveiled at The Quail this Friday, from Pagani to Koenigsegg, is operating a playbook written in Sant’Agata sixty years ago. That is why the record gathering matters beyond nostalgia: when the market honors the Miura, it is honoring its own founding document.
If Pebble Beach is about the past, the Quail at Monterey Car Week 2026 is about what you’ll be driving — or watching sell out — in 2027. The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering returns with one of its most dynamic lineups yet, featuring more than a dozen press conferences and global debuts, with exclusive displays from Aston Martin, Pagani, Koenigsegg, Gordon Murray Automotive, Lamborghini, and Lexus, plus major announcements from Lotus, Bugatti, Bentley, Acura, and Drako Motors.
Bugatti has already fired its opening shot: the one-off Destrier, the $20 million warhorse built on the Bolide’s carbon bones, was revealed on the eve of the week — we broke down everything about the Bugatti Destrier here. Expect the remaining reveals to be concentrated at The Quail on Friday, August 14, where manufacturers save their most important announcements for the collectors most likely to write deposits on the spot.
What should you actually expect from the reveals? Pagani and Koenigsegg rarely travel to Monterey without something bespoke to show their North American clients. Gordon Murray Automotive has made The Quail its de facto U.S. launchpad. Lamborghini arrives with the Miura spotlight already on it — the perfect stage to connect its heritage play to whatever comes next.
And the wildcard announcements from Lotus, Bentley, and Acura suggest the week’s news cycle will run well past Sunday. If history is a guide, at least one car revealed on Friday will be sold out — allocation list closed, speculation premiums forming — before the Concours lawn clears on the 16th.
This year’s featured classes include a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Route 66. Admission isn’t cheap, starting around $3,800 — which tells you everything about the audience these brands are courting.
The auctions are where sentiment becomes signal at Monterey Car Week 2026. Five houses hold sales between August 13 and 15 — and two of the venues are new this year, a reshuffle worth watching in itself.
| House | Venue | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Bonhams | WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca | New venue — moved from Quail Lodge |
| RM Sotheby’s | Monterey Conference Center | Traditional evening flagship sales |
| Broad Arrow | Quail Golf Club | New venue — moved from Monterey Jet Center |
| Mecum | Hyatt Regency Monterey | Volume and variety |
| Gooding Christie’s | Parc du Concours, Pebble Beach | Closest to the Concours lawn |
Watch the hammer prices closely. Monterey results set the tone for exotic and collector valuations through the rest of the year — the totals routinely reach well into nine figures across the week, and a single record sale can reprice an entire marque by Monday morning.
First, the Miura record itself: if the 3rd fairway display crosses the fifty-car mark, it becomes one of those where-were-you moments the hobby talks about for decades. Second, the W16 farewell — with Bugatti’s final sixteen-cylinder engine built in July and the Destrier freshly revealed, every W16 car on the Peninsula is suddenly a piece of settled history.
Third, the auction reshuffle: Bonhams selling at a racetrack and Broad Arrow at The Quail changes the geography of bidding, and the houses will be watching each other’s sell-through rates as closely as the bidders. Fourth, the electric question: EV hypercars keep debuting, but Monterey buyers keep paying combustion premiums — watch whether any electric debut draws Quail crowds like a V12 does.
And fifth, the youth movement: RADwood-era cars and 1990s icons keep creeping up auction dockets, and Monterey Car Week 2026 will show whether the next generation of collectors is ready to set records of its own.
Veterans will tell you the same three things about doing Monterey Car Week 2026 right. Book viewing time at the free events — the Tour d’Elegance on August 13 puts every Concours entrant on public roads, and the best photographs of the week cost nothing. Arrive everywhere earlier than feels reasonable; Peninsula traffic during Car Week is its own endurance event. And walk the auction previews even if you’ll never raise a paddle — nowhere else can you study this much significant machinery at arm’s length, catalog in hand, for the price of a day pass.
Monterey isn’t just a car show — it’s an economy. The ten-day celebration draws more than 100,000 visitors, with estimated visitor spending exceeding $130 million. More importantly for buyers and sellers, it’s the week when the market’s mood gets set: which models are heating up, which anniversary cars are entering blue-chip territory, and where smart money is moving.
Our family has covered this market for over a century, and the Monterey effect is one of its most reliable rhythms: what wins, sells, and stuns on the Peninsula in August is what appreciates through winter. Watching a model climb at Monterey? Browse current exotic inventory from verified dealers on ExoticMotors.com — before the auction results reprice the market. And if you’re considering your first exotic purchase, our step-by-step buyer’s guide covers exactly how to move when the market moves.
The numbers behind the week tell the story in a different way. Monterey auction totals have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years, with the week regularly producing several of the year’s ten most expensive cars sold at auction anywhere in the world.
Sell-through rates on the Peninsula are treated as the market’s annual physical: strong results embolden sellers into the fall, while soft ones push inventory toward private sales and patient money. For anyone holding — or hunting — an exotic, the five days between the first Bonhams lot and the Best of Show announcement are the most information-dense stretch of the collector year, and Monterey Car Week 2026 arrives with more storylines than any edition in recent memory.
Can’t be on the Peninsula for Monterey Car Week 2026? You won’t miss much if you follow smart. The Pebble Beach Concours streams its awards ceremony live on Sunday afternoon, the major auction houses run live online bidding with public catalogs — browsing them is an education in itself — and manufacturer reveals from The Quail hit social channels within minutes of their press conferences.
The serious signal from Monterey Car Week 2026 arrives after the tents come down: sell-through rates, records set or missed, and which no-reserve lots overperformed. We’ll be tracking the results and what they mean for the exotic market — follow our news section for the post-Monterey analysis, including what the record Miura gathering does to classic Lamborghini values.
One more tip for remote watchers: set aside Sunday evening for the Best of Show announcement. The winner’s identity ripples instantly through the market for that marque — dealers reprice, restorers’ waiting lists lengthen, and the next great barn-find hunt begins. Monterey Car Week 2026 will crown its winner as the sun sets over Stillwater Cove, seventy-five years after that first modest lawn party — and if the week delivers half of what it promises, the echoes will carry all the way to next August.
Monterey Car Week 2026 runs Friday, August 7 through Sunday, August 16, 2026, across the Monterey Peninsula in California.
The 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance takes place Sunday, August 16, 2026, at Pebble Beach Golf Links.
Global debuts and announcements are expected from Bugatti, Pagani, Koenigsegg, Gordon Murray Automotive, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Bentley, Lotus, and Acura, concentrated at The Quail on Friday, August 14. Bugatti opened the week by revealing the one-off Destrier.
It marks the event’s 75th anniversary and features the largest gathering of Lamborghini Miuras ever assembled, celebrating the model’s 60th anniversary on the 3rd fairway.
Yes — including the downtown Monterey Kickoff and the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance on August 13, where Concours entrants drive on public roads. Exotics on Broadway in Seaside is also free to spectators.
It varies widely by event: cruising the public viewing spots is free, Motorsports Reunion tickets start under $100, The Quail starts around $3,800, and Pebble Beach Concours admission runs several hundred dollars, with hospitality packages far higher.
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