Monterey Car Week is back to full strength after its brief Covid contraction the past 2 years, with this year’s vibrant, well-attended week featuring the traditional headline events: the Pebble Beach Tour d’ Elegance, The Quail — A Motorsports Gathering, the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, and the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

Any one of these events would be reason enough to visit the Monterey Peninsula in August, but with all of them happening over the course of four days, along with additional premium car shows, driving events, and actions, Monterey Car Week remains the ultimate annual event for automotive aficionados and enthusiasts.

Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion

The week’s festivities kicked off Wednesday with the start of the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, an annual gathering of the nation’s best vintage race cars at the 1.9-mile, 11-turn Laguna Seca race course about 10 miles east of Monterey. With 14 race categories split up by era and technology, there’s something for everyone during the four days of racing from Wednesday through Saturday. This year the Corvette’s 70th anniversary was celebrated with both vintage models and look at the 2024 Corvette E-Ray.

Pebble Beach Tour D’Elegance presented by Rolex

The Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance is another opportunity to see vintage cars in motion, this time show cars instead of race cars. All 150 vehicles entered in Sunday’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance are invited to participate in the tour on Thursday. And while participation is not required, if two cars tie in the concours competition on Sunday, the car that completed the 70-mile tour gets the win.

The tour starts and ends at Pebble Beach, after winding its way through beautiful 17-mile drive and down Highway One along the coast, traveling to Big Sur and back. If you’ve never seen multi-million dollar, museum quality vintage automobiles being driving in real-world conditions, on some of the planet’s best roads, the tour is quite a visual treat.

The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering

There are really two world-class car shows during Car Week, with The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering kicking things off Friday before the Sunday concours. This show includes both vintage and modern supercars, and is often the venue for world debuts of new exotic models like the Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution Roadster and the Lamborghini Lanzador concept, featuring an electric powertrain.

But vintage cars still play the primary role at The Quail, with this year’s show winner going to Anne Brockinton Lee for her 1956 Ferrari 410 Superamerica “Superfast 1”, a singular example of Ferrari’s 1950s-era grand tourer with a 4.9-liter V12 engine and Pininfarina body. The winner not only took home a trophy but an engraved Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust 36 watch.

Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance

Capping every Monterey Car Week is the Sunday Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, with more than 150 cars ranging in age from 1906 to 1998. Parked along the golf course’s 18th fairway, the Concours consistently presents an ocean of automotive art unmatched in the world. Additional features include a concept car lawn showing the latest new production and concept models, many of them introduced during Car Week. There’s also a dedicated Ferrari lawn with a new theme paying homage to the Italian carmaker every year.

This year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance was won by a 1937 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Roadster, a model that included its original supercharged straight-eight engine and was unrestored when the current owner acquired it in 2022. These cars made 180 horsepower and could reach speeds above 100 mph when new, an incredible level of performance at the time. As with The Quail, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance winner, Jim Patterson, received both the notoriety of winning the world’s most prestigious car award as well as a specially engraved Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust 36 watch.