Monterey Car Week 2026: hypercar debuts and a $4.57M Bugatti

Monterey Car Week runs August 7–16 this year, and by Thursday night the shape of it was clear enough to call. The auctions are still the financial spine of the week. The 75th Pebble Beach Concours still closes it on Sunday morning on the 18th fairway. But the center of gravity has moved down the peninsula, and it has moved toward cars that did not exist a month ago.

That is not a complaint. It is a change in what the week is for, and it changes what you point a camera at.

Bonhams moved to Laguna Seca, and a two-year-old car won the room

After 29 years at Quail Lodge, Bonhams ran its Monterey sale at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on August 13, timed against the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. The venue change alone was the story going in — a classic-car auction leaving the manicured lawn for a paddock.

Then the results came in. The 2026 Bonhams Monterey sale totalled roughly $12 million at a 79% sell-through, and the top lot was a 2024 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport — one of 80 built, Glacier white over Rouge Étoilé — at $4,570,000. Second was a 2000 Lamborghini Diablo GT, the 74th of 80, at $2,425,000 and a model record. Third, at $698,000, was a 1967 Vollstedt-Ford USAC Indianapolis single-seater.

Read that order again. At an auction staged inside a historic racing weekend, a car built two years ago outsold a genuine Indy 500 chassis by more than six to one. The Diablo GT result is the more interesting one to me — that car was a nobody's-darling analog V12 for twenty years, and it just set its own record in the same week the manufacturers were selling the future. Nineties analog is no longer the cheap seats.

The Quail is now a product launch with a lawn under it

The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, ran Friday, August 14, and the debut slate read like a motor show. Per Motor1's rundown of the week's reveals, the headliners:

1. Bugatti Destrier — 1,578 hp from a quad-turbocharged 8.0-liter W16, and at 39.4 inches, the lowest car Bugatti has built.
2. Lamborghini Revuelto SV — the hotter V12 hybrid, which turned a 1:41.6 at Hockenheimring with factory driver Marco Mapelli before anyone was allowed to photograph it.
3. Hennessey Blackbird — a naturally aspirated 6.2-liter V8 making 800–850 hp, targeting sub-3,000 pounds, 71 cars at $2.5 million each.
4. Gordon Murray Special Vehicles — a global debut hosted by Murray and three-time Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti, details held to the reveal.
5. Acura — a concept previewing the brand's next design language, moving to the Pebble Beach Concept Lawn on Sunday.

Bugatti still building a W16 in 2026 is its own kind of statement. So is Hennessey going the other way entirely — no turbos, no hybrid, 71 cars, all of the weight taken out instead of power added in. We wrote about the end of the V8 era at McLaren last month and about Ferrari putting a gated manual back in the 12 Cilindri in July. The Blackbird is the same trade, made louder: a small number of buyers will now pay a hypercar premium specifically for the thing being subtracted.

Worth saying plainly — there is a persistent rumor of a manual McLaren, and we are not going to report it as fact until McLaren says the words. Car Week is where rumors go to get repeated confidently.

The 75th Pebble Beach: Ferrari, Vignale, and a Miura on the third fairway

Sunday, August 16 is the 75th running. The 2026 featured classes are the reason to care:

• Featured marque: Ferrari, with the emphasis on Chinetti and NART competition cars — the North American Racing Team entries, which is the correct Ferrari story to tell at an American concours.
• Featured coachbuilder: Carrozzeria Alfredo Vignale, the 1950s Italian body house whose work never got the Pininfarina-level canonization it earned.
• New classes: Early American Speedsters (pre-WWI), Classic Streamliners (1930s aerodynamics), and Japanese Motorsports: The Rising Sun at Speed, built around Le Mans machinery.

Lamborghini is marking the Miura's 60th with a curated gathering, and Pebble Beach Golf Links is opening the third fairway during Concours week to hold it — the first time that ground has been used.

A Japanese motorsports class at Pebble Beach is the detail I'd flag if you only remember one thing. The Concours spent decades defining "significant" as prewar European coachwork. Adding a Le Mans-focused Japanese class at the 75th is an institution updating its own definition in public, and it will pull a different crowd onto the grass.

What any of this means from San Diego

We shoot in San Diego, some 450 road miles south of the peninsula. Car Week is not our home game — La Jolla Concours is, and its 20th running took the Cove on April 24–26 this year. But the Monterey week sets the register for the whole calendar, and what it just demonstrated is that the audience for a brand-new hypercar and the audience for a NART Ferrari are now the same people, standing on the same lawn, in the same four days.

That collapse is already visible in our own work. The cars showing up to Southern California meets are not sorted by decade anymore. A Testarossa parks next to something with a warranty on it, and both draw the same ring of phones — that's Testarossa · The Meet, and the Ferrari Convoy frame is the rolling version of the same idea. The archive doesn't sort itself into "classic" and "modern" either, because our clients stopped asking for that split.

How we'd shoot the week

If we were up there with a chase car, three things:

Shoot the concours in the first ninety minutes. Pebble's field is on the 18th at 10:30, but the cars stage from dawn and the light on the fairway before the crowd thickens is the only time you'll get a clean side profile. After ten, every panel on the field is a mirror pointed at a thousand people in Panama hats.

Treat the debut cars like product, not like art. A Destrier under a Quail tent is a lit set with a rope around it. Three-quarter front, low, wide enough to hold the tent structure out of the reflection — you are not going to get a hero frame there, you're going to get the record shot. The hero frame happens the following week when someone drives one.

The road is still where the story is. Highway 1 between Carmel and Big Sur during Car Week is the densest supercar traffic in the country, and a rolling shot out of it beats anything on a lawn. We have made the case for rollers over statics before and Car Week proves it annually: the auction photos are documents, the roller is the thing people put on a wall.

The 75th closes Sunday. The Concept Lawn cars go home, the Bugatti goes into a collection where nobody will ever see the underside of it, and the Diablo GT's new owner has a receipt that revalues every good analog V12 in the country.

Nothing on our archive was shot at Pebble. All of it was shot on roads you can actually drive — Palomar, the 74, the canyon runs behind Rancho Santa Fe. Browse the archive — 104 frames, licensed from $45.