Ten days when the whole peninsula turns into one long paddock. The traffic on Highway 1, the fog over 17-Mile Drive, cars you only ever see in books rolling past a coffee cart. This is the week, filed from the inside.
Car Week is not the <<auctions>>. It is the mornings, the sounds, and the people who show up for the love of it.
A local's take on Monterey Car Week, start to finish. Where to be, what it feels like, and the pieces worth remembering.
Beat the traffic, find the free views, eat like a local. The full guide lands this week.
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Coverage, local guides, and daily picks from Monterey Car Week.
Coverage, local guides, and daily picks from Monterey Car Week.
The Friday before Car Week has a feeling you only understand once you have lived it. The transporters are unloading. The hotels are filling. The whole peninsula is holding its breath before ten days of noise, and for one night none of it has started yet. That is the Kickoff. The calm before the storm. … Read more
Highway 1 locks up from about 11am to 4pm every single day of Car Week. Not slows down. Locks. The people who do this well don’t sit in it. Most of what separates a good Car Week from a miserable one is knowing that kind of thing before you leave the house. So I put … Read more
Everybody underdresses for this week exactly once. Then they learn. Pebble can sit at 55 degrees in fog you can practically taste while Laguna Seca is baking in the high 80s ten miles inland. Same afternoon, same person, if they drive between the two. So the real Car Week uniform isn’t a look, it’s a … Read more
It’s 7am at a gas station on Highway 68 and there’s a car here worth more than my house, taking on fuel like it’s a Tuesday commute. The owner is in a fleece, holding a coffee, half awake, standing next to something that idles like it’s clearing its throat. Nobody is performing. That’s exactly why … Read more
I’m standing at the exit corner of Spanish Bay at dusk with a microphone, and there are bagpipes playing on the lawn behind me while something with twelve cylinders idles past three feet away. Both sounds at once, layered, neither one giving way to the other. I don’t know where else on earth that specific … Read more
There is one of each. That’s the model, and some days it’s also the headache. When I find a piece, there is no second one in the back. No size run, no restock, no “let me check the warehouse.” The warehouse is a shelf. What’s here is what’s here, and when it’s gone it’s gone … Read more
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