Monterey Car Week 2021

I leave this morning and I can hardly wait. I’m driving an Aston Martin V12 Vantage manual 6-speed to Pebble Beach. Yes! Back road driving to five days of auto industry craziness – countless concours events and car shows raising millions of dollars benefiting charity, seven major auto auctions selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cars, several days of vintage auto racing, and who knows how many manufacturer and club sponsored special events. This is a week of the most massive car sensory overload you can imagine. It is one of the finest ode’s to the automobile around. If you like cars this is a bucket list event.

For starters, there’s the excitement of the drive down. I generally stay away from interstates as much as possible. For a fun reflection on several of my drives to Pebble, read “A Personal Mille Miglia.” This fun excerpt from a review of the car I’m driving is enough to get you going all by itself:

“The V12 Vantage is, in my 13 years here, the first Aston Martin I would describe as a toy,” says Dr. Ulrich Bez.

This is true in approximately the same way that one of those medieval spiked iron balls is suitable for young children. Ages four and up. Point away from face.

The V12 Vantage is a machine for splitting skulls and smiting your enemies. It’s an instrument of brutality, an old-school lesson in the corruptive effects of absolute power. Aston Martins are supposed to be the sleek, reserved, high-speed conveyances of gentlemen. This thing’s a throwback to how those lords got their titles: by staving the other bloke’s helmet in.

In other words, it’s bloody fantastic.

The recipe for this hand-built British slice of excellence, this nitroglycerine suet pudding, is as simple as they come.

…This is a very angry car. A very, very angry car. 

The first sense of this rage that roils and seethes beneath the carbon fibre-slatted prison of the V12 Vantage’s hood comes when you try to drive the thing through town like a normal human being.

Oh yes, the sound. The dash-mounted sport button dials up the ferocity of the shifts and the sensitivity of the pedal, and opens up baffles in the exhaust that take the muzzle off the V12 and allow it to snarl and grumble. Fantastic stuff, and we’re still just in traffic.

(Finally), the sun-baked gridlock thins, and the empty desert beckons. The little Aston perks up. It’s like a shark smelling blood in the water. Entering the first corner at speed, the massive, now-standard Pirelli Corsa tires grip without fuss. Lateral gs build through the cambered curve, the steering wheel is unwound on exit and in the same, smooth motion, the throttle is depressed gently but firmly.

This causes all hell to break loose.

What a machine! If the similarly priced Porsche GT3 is a scalpel for surgical precision corner carving, then this thing’s a claymore. It simply blasts out of the corners with colossal thrust, your brain saying helpful things like, “Gee, that’s rather a long way down there, isn’t it?” and then it’s brake-brake-brake-oh-my-aching-eyeballs-these-brakes all the way back into shape for the next twist of empty desert mountain road.

Subtlety? Nope. Genteel road manners? Nope. Reasonable fuel economy? Hah! What you do get is suction-cup grip that very, very slowly builds to a slight front-end push if you’re entering a corner slightly too quickly, and a Spitfire-strafing-a-Messerschmitt soundtrack when you blast out of the other end of it. 

You’d never buy this car for the technology or refinement. You’d buy it for its feelsome hydraulic steering, its easily modulated yet fearsomely capable brakes, its incredible level of sheer grip and, of course, its glorious 12-cylinder heartbeat. It’s the opposite of the efficient, clinical modern supercar. It’s what 1970s Formula One’s James Hunt would be if you gave him four wheels: Roguish, flawed, charming, obsessed with speed, a character.

It’s an extremely bad influence, this car. And you can’t help but love it.” – Brendan McAleer, Postmedia News

I think you get the idea. Once you get there, Pebble has a lot to do. Mostly, I’m going to give you a picture run down of some of the events. So here we go.

The Little Car Show is typically on Wednesdays and is what it’s name implies – little cars. Lots of fun.

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On Thursday there’s the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance, where cars entered in Sunday’s Pebble Concours head out for a 70 mile drive down Big Sur:

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While the week’s big events usually kick off on Wednesday with the McCall Motorworks Revival (tickets start at $450) featuring cars and airplanes, the big three cars shows are the Quail, Concorso Italiano and Pebble Beach. The exclusive Quail, A Motorsport Gathering kicks off on Friday where tickets are sold by lottery and begin around $700:

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Concorso Italiano is on Saturday with over 1,000 Italian cars. Tickets begin at a modest $195:

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The Pebble Beach Concours finishes the week on Sunday. Tickets start at $400:

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Vintage car racing at Laguna Seca just outside Carmel…

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Intimate Car forums in the Inn at Spanish Bay…

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And lots of auctions. There’s even the irreverent, like the Concours d’Lemons, which is held on Wednesday as a tongue-in-cheek parody to the perfection of the week’s showcase event. I will be attending for the first time this year.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re either curious or a car junkie. Suffice to say, this is a very unique week of car-based charitable giving with a very fun spectator backdrop taken very seriously by the owners of concours cars. As a result, there’s an awful lot going on that runs the full spectrum of participation. It’s fun just to observe all of this. Having an interest in cars is a big plus.

I have only shown you a smattering of the events that go on. There are so many you cannot see them all. Next week will be my seventh time here and I still haven’t seen everything! And every year there is always something new and different. So, if you have an interest in history and cars, this is a fantastic place to be. Maybe I’ll see you there. In the meantime, I’ll be cruising the backroads somewhere between here and there….