Car Week 2026: The Recap

The 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance closed Sunday afternoon the way it always does — with confetti drifting across the 18th fairway and a Best in Show winner being driven slowly onto the stage while the crowd pressed forward. What made this year's closing different was the accumulation of things it marked the end of: the week's tenth day, the 75th edition of the show, and the final Best in Show presentation by chairman Sandra Button, whose 40-year tenure shaped the Concours into the institution it is today.

The week itself was extraordinary by almost any measure. The auction totals set a new record for the third-highest Monterey result in history. The top auction result for an American car was shattered. A new Ferrari sold for $40 million. And a 1935 Duesenberg that once belonged to Clark Gable won the most coveted prize in the collector car world for the second time in its life — the first having been 19 years ago, with the same owner.

 

Best in Show: Clark Gable's Duesenberg

The announcement came after 5 p.m., later than many in the crowd had expected, and when it did the confetti went up and the name Harry Yeaggy was on everyone's lips before most people had processed which car had won.

The 1935 Duesenberg SSJ Special Speedster, shown by Yeaggy of Cincinnati, Ohio, was originally owned by Clark Gable — one of two SSJ Speedsters built by Duesenberg in 1935, the other having gone to Gary Cooper. It is among the most historically significant American automobiles in existence, and seeing it win Best in Show at the Concours' 75th edition felt less like a coincidence than a fitting conclusion to an anniversary program that had been building toward something definitive.

Yeaggy won Best in Show in 2007 with another Duesenberg — the SJ Mormon Meteor Special Speedster — and his comment afterward was the kind of thing that stays with people who heard it. He said he had been coming back every year for nineteen years to do it again, and that people do not realize how hard it is and how special it is to win. He was right on both counts.

The win gave Duesenberg eight Best in Show trophies at Pebble Beach, making the American marque the event's all-time leader. For a brand that ceased production in 1937, that record is one of the more improbable achievements in automotive history.

 

The End of Sandra Button's 40-Year Tenure

The Best in Show presentation was also Sandra Button's last as chairman of the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. She has held that role for four decades, during which the event grew from a respected regional concours into the standard by which every other collector car show in the world measures itself. The charitable giving milestone reached this year — the Concours surpassed $50 million in total charitable giving since its inception — is in significant part a product of the institutional seriousness Button brought to a role that could easily have remained ceremonial.

The collector car world will be watching to see what the Concours looks like under new leadership. The 76th edition is already announced, with Delage celebrating its Grand Prix-winning centennial as the featured marque, and the program suggests that the curatorial ambition that defined the Button era will continue. But the passing of a 40-year tenure is the kind of transition that changes the character of an institution whether anyone intends it to or not.

 

The 75th Pebble Beach Concours will be remembered for Clark Gable's Duesenberg, for Sandra Button's final presentation, and for $412 million crossing the auction block in four days. It was a week that felt like it knew it was historic.

 

The Auctions: $412 Million and a New American Record

Across five auction houses over four days, total sales reached $412 million — a 23 percent increase over 2025 and the third-highest total in Monterey history, behind only 2022 and 2014. The half-billion-dollar record that analysts had projected heading into the week did not materialize, but the result was strong by any standard, and the headline sales were among the most dramatic the Monterey auctions have produced.

The Shelby Cobra Daytona, $42.9 million: The week's top result came at Gooding Christie's Pebble Beach Auctions, where Carroll Shelby's former 1964 Cobra Daytona Coupe sold for $42.9 million, making it the most valuable American car ever sold at public auction. The car had not appeared publicly since 2009, when a comparable example sold for $7.25 million. The seventeen-year gap and the car's racing provenance produced bidding that significantly exceeded pre-sale estimates.

The Ferrari Luce, $40 million: RM Sotheby's achieved its highest result of the event with the 2026 Ferrari Luce Tailor Made, chassis 0 — an all-electric Ferrari that simultaneously set records as the most expensive electric car and the most expensive automotive charity lot ever sold at auction. The result was striking not only for the number but for what it signals about where the high end of the collector car market is moving.

The McLaren F1 GTR, nearly $35 million: A 1996 McLaren F1 GTR achieved close to $35 million at RM Sotheby's, setting a new record for the marque and for British-built cars at auction. The F1 GTR's continued appreciation reflects the broader generational shift in the collector market — the buyers who grew up watching these cars race at Le Mans in the 1990s now have the resources to acquire them.

The Corvette Grand Sport, nearly $19 million: The 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport sold at RM Sotheby's for close to $19 million, more than doubling the previous Corvette auction record. Five Grand Sports were built for racing in 1963 before GM's corporate ban on racing activity ended the program. Their scarcity and their significance in American racing history have made them among the most coveted American collector cars of the postwar era.

 

What the Market Is Saying

The 2026 Monterey results confirm a shift in the collector car market that analysts have been tracking for several years. The buyers driving the upper end of the market are increasingly millennials and members of Gen Z rather than baby boomers, and their collecting preferences are different in character from the prior generation.

Prewar Duesenbergs and Bugattis still win Best in Show and still command significant auction prices. But the cars seeing the most aggressive appreciation are the high-performance machines of the 1990s and early 2000s — the McLaren F1, the Ferrari F40, the Bugatti Veyron, the limited-production Japanese sports cars that a generation of buyers grew up reading about and are now acquiring. A 2005 Porsche Carrera GT sold for $2.1 million. A 2012 Lexus LFA Nürburgring Edition brought $1.8 million. These are not the cars that defined Monterey auctions a decade ago.

The collector car market, like most markets for scarce high-quality assets, reflects who has money and what they value. The generational transition underway at Monterey in 2026 will define the market for the next decade.

 

From the Peninsula

For those of us who were here for the week, the 75th had a quality that was harder to quantify than the auction totals or the Best in Show result. The Tour d'Elegance on Thursday morning moved through the fog along 17-Mile Drive with the unhurried confidence of a tradition that knows exactly what it is. The Concours on the Avenue drew the kind of crowd that uses Ocean Avenue as a living room rather than a destination. The Sunday fairway, under a light gray sky that kept the heat off, held 218 cars from 30 states and 14 countries.

Harry Yeaggy drove Clark Gable's Duesenberg onto the stage when the confetti fell. Sandra Button gave her last award. The Peninsula will do it again next August, for the 76th time, with Delage as the featured marque and a new chairman at the podium. The tradition continues.

 

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