Pebble Beach 2016: Gordon McCall’s party kicks off Monterey Car Week
Smoke and ash clouded the coastal skies as auto entrepreneur Gordon McCall unofficially opened this year’s Monterey Car Week with his annual Motorworks Revival party.
The exclusive Wednesday night event — there is a VIP line and a red carpet line, but no line for anyone else — drew several thousand guests who paid $395 to $550 to drink Roederer Champagne, nibble caviar and ogle a vast collection of racing cars, vintage motorcycles and top airplanes and jets.
Meanwhile, the Soberanes brush fire, burning south of Monterey in the Big Sur area, has charred 79,000 acres and, weeks into its burn, remains only 60% contained, fire officials said Thursday morning.
The conflagration had threatened to close some of the dozens of planned Car Week events, which depend on the scenic Highway 1 thoroughfare for traffic to and from gatherings.
As of Thursday morning, no events had been canceled, though several of the annual rallies had altered their routes. The most august of these, the Wednesday Tour d’Elegance, was rerouting its parade of vintage and antique cars away from Highway 1, concentrating principally on the curvy coastal 17 Mile Drive.
This prompted some wags to begin referring to the Tour as the “17-Hour Drive,” as some predicted it would take that long for the large collection of vehicles to complete the route.
Financially speaking, though, the skies were sunny as auction houses set up their tents and rolled in their vehicles to be sold.
Analysts estimating the value of the prized vehicles to be sold by Sotheby’s, Bonhams, Gooding, Mecum, Russo and Steele and Rick Cole were not suggesting that the week’s totals would top the record-setting $463.6 million in cars sold in 2014. That year, a vintage Ferrari went for $38 million to become the most expensive car sold at a public auction.
But those analysts, without making official predictions, said they expected the 2016 total to be at or above 2015 levels. Last year, about 860 vehicles with an average price of $461,000 passed under the gavel, for a total sale value of $396.7 million.
At Jet Center, where McCall presided over his 25th annual get-together, new vehicles from Acura, McLaren and Alfa Romeo stood alongside handcrafted custom cars. Eye-catchers included Aquarius, a polished aluminum French-deco-inspired creation that Carlsbad designer Rick Dore built for Metallica musician James Hetfield.
At one side of the tarmac, jet fanciers stood in line to get a peek inside a custom-crafted Gulfstream. At another side, vintage aircraft fans stood in line to sit inside a 1950s DC-3A that had been outfitted with a modern, custom leather interior.
Between them were collections of vintage BMW sports cars, E-type Jaguars, aircraft from Pilatus, a desert storm trooper from USSV Rhino, concept vehicles from Toyota and new vehicles from Koenigsegg and Pagani.
At one side of the Motorworks revival hangar stood a collection of vintage Norton motorcycles, including a Manx racer from McCall’s private collection. Across the way, a pair of gleaming new KRGT-1 motorcycles, from Keanu Reeves’ Arch Motorcycles, attracted two-wheeler fans.
Top food award for the night, had they given one, would have gone to chef Tony Baker of Baker’s Bacon and Monterey’s Montrio Bistro. He was serving thin slices of slow-smoked bacon under a cover of pickled apple, topped with local honey, over a paste of bacon-infused peanut butter.
Most incongruous sight of the night: a solo attendee, rolling slowly from one presentation to the next on a Segway “personal transportation” device.
