Monterey Car Week Auction Records Mask Wide Collector Market Divergence

Get automotive news, DIY tips, market trends, in-depth car profiles, and more right in your email inbox. The numbers are in, and the 2026 Monterey auctions made history. Total sales reached a record of $755.6M, surpassing even the pandemic-fueled frenzy of 2022. Beneath the headline sat a more complicated story: The market is diverging between the cars collectors desperately wanted and everything else. Here are the big takeaways: Modern supercars exceeded expectations and accounted for more than half of all sales. 1960s American cars enjoyed some outstanding results, with a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona coupe selling for $42.9M, a record for an American car, and a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport sold for $18.7M, a record for a Corvette. The highly anticipated 1996 McLaren F1 GTR sold for $34.7M, a record for a British car at auction. Prewar cars regained some market share. They were led by a 1935 Duesenberg Model JN at $9.1M, which earned the third-highest price ever for a Duesenberg Exceptional cars sold for record prices, while many more common models, from the 1950s and 1960s, sold for less than condition-appropriate amounts Even though the $755.6M total exceeds 2022’s record high by some $284M, the number requires context. A handful of extraordinary, nearly irreplaceable cars carried enormous sums that pulled the total skyward, while a broad swath of more common offerings q

In our Monterey Preview post , we asked whether the auctions in Monterey could finally beat the record dollar volume of $469M set in 2022. It turns out, the answer is a resounding YES. Over the course of 3 days on a tiny peninsula in California, 850 cars sold across 5 auctions for $751M, with an average price of $892,317. Every metric that we measure auctions by turned out to be a record except one: sell-through came in at 75.6%, a hair under 2022’s 76.2%, so 2022 keeps that single crown. Here’s how the numbers shifted over the past 5 years: Monterey’s money landed very unevenly. RM Sotheby’s Monterey sold 20% of the cars and generated 50% of the money. Together with Gooding Christie’s Pebble Beach , those two auctions accounted for 71% of the total dollar volume – beating 2022’s entire record between them. Gooding also posted the week’s two best individual numbers: a 93.4% sell-through and the $42,905,000 top sale of a very unique Shelby Daytona . Mecum Monterey sold more cars than anyone else: they brought 521 lots (46% of the entire Monterey catalogue), and sold 324 of them. However, these cars were a lower average price than the other sales – with a total dollar volume of $111.6M, about 15% of the week’s money. Rounding out the list, Broad Arrow’s Quail Auction brought $93.5M on 154 cars at 81.5% sell-through, and Bonhams’ Laguna Seca debut took $11.9M from the week’s small

Monterey Car Week has come and gone once more, leaving a pile of new supercars and one-off creations in its wake. Now that the festivities are officially behind us, we can finally confirm that this year’s auctions were truly a record-setting affair, with the five major auction houses generating some $762 million in total sales, including premiums and charity events. According to Hemmings , RM Sotheby’s, Gooding Christie’s, Mecum, Broad Arrow, and Bonhams all combined to move over three-quarters of a billion dollars worth of cars between Thursday, August 13, and Saturday, August 15. Not only is that a new all-time record for the Car Week auctions, it utterly destroys the previous $471 million record set back in 2022. To further reiterate how crazy of a jump that is, last year’s auction totals came in at an estimated $433 million. That’s a difference of 76 percent. Hemmings notes that there were around 1133 vehicles offered across the major auction houses during Monterey, with 859 units managing to find their next owner. That represents a 76 percent sell-through rate across all houses. Gooding Christie’s sellers had the best luck with a 94 percent sell-through rate, followed closely by RM Sotheby’s at 87 percent; Broad Arrow rounded off the podium with an 85 percent sell-through rate of its own. Perhaps more interestingly, 142 cars traded hands for more than $1 million, helping t