Monterey Car Week is the formal name for the colliding cavalcade of events that surround the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance each August in the Monterey Peninsula. While that classic car show is the core experience, all manner of ancillary events—displays, races, parades, sales, and rallies of vintage vehicles, as well as test drives of modern exclusive ones—have joined to create a days-long Bacchanal.
Because these events are spread out over the Monterey Peninsula and involve temperamental new and old vehicles (and their often equally temperamental owners) along with hordes of rubbernecking gawkers and content-creating aficionados, they also create a monumental traffic jam that swarms the region’s limited roads.
But this motorized mishegoss has not prevented me, in 15 years of attending, from enjoying, on-site, some of the most profound drives of my life.
If it looks like I’m having a blast, it’s because I am.
I took a Ferrari 488 down the coast to Big Sur, drove a Ferrari Portofino up the newly reopened Highway 1 from L.A., and caused a sunset spectacle on the Bixby Bridge in a Rolls Royce Spectre. I got hopelessly lost, as I often do, in a Lamborghini Huracán in the Santa Lucias, a Lamborghini Aventador S Roadster on the 17-Mile Drive, and an Aston Martin DB12 around Watsonville. I drove a Maybach S680 and a Bentley Flying Spur to the same Santa Cruz cannabis dispensary two years apart, and felt humiliated when the curbside delivery guy remembered me. I was ticketed in a Mercedes-AMG SL65 doing 35 mph over the speed limit near San Jose. When the cop asked why I was going so fast, I simply gestured at the car like a showcase model on “The Price is Right.” The fine was so high that I asked my accountant if I could write it off as a business expense. (The answer was, “No.”)
Driving across Big Sur’s Bixby Bridge never gets old.
Of course, vintage vehicles are the crux at MCW. So, while on site, I’ve driven every generation of Mercedes SL, a 237,000-mile 1979 Mercedes 450 SEL sedan, a 1930 Blower Bentley, a priceless wedgy 1969 Mercedes C111 concept, and a $15 million 1935 Mercedes 540K with questionable provenance. I drove a 1990s three-rotor Mazda Eunos Cosmo to an oceanfront dinner party. I took a spin in a terrorizingly explosive 1985 Lancia Delta S4 Stradale Group B homologation special that was heading to auction. And I still kick myself for skipping an early morning opportunity to drive a friend’s 1931 V-16 Cadillac, because I’d partied too hard the evening before.
While friends have experienced major breakdowns and even horrifying crashes during MCW, I have fortunately averted disaster. I attribute this to two factors. First, I know better than to push a vehicle during a Pebble Beach drive. The roads are crowded, surprises lurk everywhere, and local law enforcement is non-compliant.
But more than this, I know that the point of driving a car during Monterey Car Week is not to explore its limits. The point is to enjoy the landscape, to feel osmotically endowed with an understanding of the era in which the vehicle was built—what made it special then; what makes it special now—and, mostly, to luxuriate in the spectacle of doing so.
Surrounded by billions of dollars in rare, unconscionable, or outré metal, where everyone is present to gawk or be gawked at, motoring by in something outstanding transforms the arduous (and terrifying) experience of piloting these vehicles into something astounding. It becomes as much about the car itself—I’M DRIVING A DAMN BLOWER BENTLEY—as about providing a rolling feast for spectators, whether they’re billionaire owners or Tik-Tok-ing kids seeking views and likes.
Like a focused period film, Monterey Car Week is an entire world dedicated to recreating a mood or setting, although this one is not restricted by a certain time, but rather by theme: the most interesting cars in the world. Driving there, one feels like a co-star in that cinematic experience, buoyed by and bounded within an adoring audience, who are also, somehow, in the movie. It’s “The Killing of Sister George,” and everyone’s a resident of Applehurst.
This year in Monterey, I’ll be testing out the new Maserati GranTurismo Folgore, the purely electric version of one of the most lithe and handsome two-seat GTs on the market, as well as a 1932 Maybach Zeppelin DS8, a three-ton, V-12-powered German luxobarge, with what is likely questionable provenance. I don’t expect to reach V-Max in either, or have much to report on the quality of their suspensions. With Monterey Car Week as the context for my test drives, though, I know they’ll be spectacular.
Brett Berk (he/him) is a former preschool teacher and early childhood center director who spent a decade as a youth and family researcher and now covers the topics of kids and the auto industry for publications including CNN, the New York Times, Popular Mechanics and more. He has published a parenting book, The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting, and since 2008 has driven and reviewed thousands of cars for Car and Driver and Road & Track, where he is contributing editor. He has also written for Architectural Digest, Billboard, ELLE Decor, Esquire, GQ, Travel + Leisure and Vanity Fair.
