Monterey Car Week 2025 Recap
Hi Friends!
Another Monterey Car Week is in the books! A lot of notable stuff happened this year as well. Almost everything was up in almost every primary category, we witnessed the full-scale generational change in the market and maybe most importantly we were reminded once again how magical live auctions can actually be.
Of course, we’re all fascinated with things like Bring-a-Trailer and other online outlets and I would probably guess that the likelihood that most of us reading this are probably on those sites at least a few times a week (if not a few times a day) is pretty high, but there’s just something different about presenting a car in a live auction environment that just feels so much more special. Especially at a car week. It’s a bona fide art form and nobody does it at a higher level than auction performers during Monterey Car Week.
Last week, we talked about three possible scenarios: The good, the good but not so good and the ugly. Fortunately, there was a good amount of good, a better amount of good but not so good and almost no ugly.
Here’s the overalls (per the folks at Hagerty):
Note: post sale is likely to continue for the next few days, so results may change
2024 Cumulative Results
Cumulative Total: $414.2M
803/1076 lots sold: 75% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $515,817
2024 Cumulative Results
Cumulative Total: $391.6M
821/1143 lots sold: 72% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $476,965
Overall Top 10 Sales:
- 2025 Ferrari Daytona SP3 Coupe – $26,000,000 (RM Sotheby’s)*
- 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Competizione Alloy Spider – $25,305,000 (Gooding Christie’s)
- 1993 Ferrari F40 LM GTC Coupe – $11,005,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
- 1995 Ferrari F50 Coupe – $9,245,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
- 2020 Bugatti Divo Coupe – $8,557,500 (Bonhams)
- 1973 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Competizione – $8,145,000 (Gooding Christie’s)
- 1957 Ferrari 250 California California Spider – $7,265,000 (Gooding Christie’s)
- 2017 Ferrari LaFerrari Aperta Spider – $6,715,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
- 1935 Mercedes-Benz 500K Sindelfingen Special Roadster – $5,340,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
- 2015 Ferrari LaFerrari Coupe – $5,230,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
*Indicates charity lot
Let’s take a look at results by the individual auction houses:
2025 Cumulative Total: $119.1M
145/178 lots sold: 81% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $821,276
2024 Cumulative Total: $105.3M
149/183 lots sold: 81% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $706,974
I think it’s fair to say that this was the most anticipated auction event of Monterey Car Week 2025. Gooding put together a fantastic catalog with dazzling headliners, new branding and a lot of questions about how their partnership with Christie’s would begin to play out. I think it’s hard to dispute that so far, things definitely seem to be going well over there. The gray along with Christie’s red looks fantastic in their showroom and you can tell from the overall production that more money was invested and in the right places. Although the charm of the mid-century news show set does unfortunately appear to be gone, there is a tight luxurious feel in its place now that undoubtedly elevates the brand. Additionally, lead auctioneer Charlie Ross was masterful. Although, not as blunt and in your face as he’s been in previous installments, it wasn’t really required on this one. It was clear that he maintained maximum control over the room with little to no effort and that’s why he remains the best auctioneer in the world.
The only thing I’m really left with as far as criticism is concerned here (and this is exceptionally minor) is that they should be including year, make and model of the vehicle on offer, on screen on the live stream. Obviously, they expect people to know the catalog, but just including the lot number alone did look a little bit thoughtless and incomplete. Again, I’m digging super deep here, but that’s really the only thing I noticed. Near flawless sale from Gooding Christie’s.
2025 Cumulative Total: $163.8M
135/158 lots sold: 85% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $1,213,288
2024 Cumulative Total: $154.1M
169/200 lots sold: 85% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $911,732
As crazy as it sounds, coming into Monterey 2025, it did sort of feel like RM was flying a bit under the radar. Even going through the catalog, there wasn’t a ton of stuff that jumped out at me. Obviously, I personally loved the Alfa Romeo collection and they did have a ton of significant cars, but it wasn’t anything that necessarily stood out (except maybe the Ferrari F40 LM, which they over performed on for sure) and got in your face prior to the sale. Of course, once the sale began it was one big car after another, after another, after another and they were getting them done. The consistency that RM’s consignment team put together here was astonishing and their average sale price of $1.2 million per car really showed that. They also produced what was likely the biggest surprise from this week as well. A $26 million charity sale (on the last new Ferrari Daytona SP3 supplied directly by Marinello) to sneak in and grab top sale of the week was a slick move and although I expect they kind of knew this was going to happen, they were pretty quiet about it and it was a good headline grab for them. Last week, I talked about the tortoise and the hare philosophy, I think that’s pretty much what happened here and it produced a win for RM. Regardless of what anybody else is flashing around out there, they’re the kings of Monterey. There’s no two ways about it. RM Sotheby’s is a smart company, run by a smart group of folks. Kudos to them on another job well done.
2025 Cumulative Total: $49.8M
128/169 lots sold: 76% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $389,133
2024 Cumulative Total: $69.5M
129/156 lots sold: 83% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $538,778
The overall, uniform verbiage that I’ve seen get tossed around since the completion of Broad Arrow’s 2025 Monterey sale has essentially been “mixed bag”. I think this is probably a pretty accurate assessment of what occurred at the Jet Center this week. On a few lots, they absolutely hit it out of the park (their star Maserati MC12 for example), but a lot more stuff seemingly came up short (second lowest publicly sold price on a Ferrari 275/4 in like 5 years for example). Obviously, their efforts are certainly real and present (they still landed in third place for the week overall), but something’s definitely missing over there. They’ve got all the talent in the world (like literally they went out and got everyone else’s rock stars and there’s like 70 staff members listed on their website) and they’ve certainly got no shortage of money, so I’m not sure what the issue is. I would expect that this company would be growing exponentially year over year and although they’ve expanded their calendar quite a lot, this sale was disappointing I think overall. It’s long been speculated that Wall Street tactics don’t work in enthusiast areas and that may be part of what’s going on here. There’s too many layers to get through and decisions aren’t made quickly enough and in time with what the market demands and we’ve seen that hold back a lot of publicly traded companies and they’ve entered into this space in the past (we all remember the Richite Bros/Leake disaster – and Richie Bros stock is at $115.00 a share, so that company definitely isn’t dumb). Obviously, there’s never been any company that’s done this that has the level of expertise that Hagerty does (and again, their staff is incredibly experienced and accomplished too), but something just seems off. Again, I don’t want to take away from what was ultimately still a pretty good sale overall, but I think the marketplace was expecting more from them on this one. Onward and upward……
2025 Cumulative Total: $37.3M
308/480 lots sold: 64% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $121,058
2024 Cumulative Total: $51.3M
292/496 lots sold: 59% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $175,613
The results here for Mecum in Monterey 2025 were pretty predictable. Although they were down a decent amount, this definitely seems to be expected and I think whatever goals that Mecum had coming in this year were probably met with relative ease. About a year and a half ago, I talked about Island economies in correlation with certain American auction houses (Mecum definitely being one) and how valuable creating a self-sustaining ecosystem can be for organizations like this. Simply put, Mecum has their audience, they’re not really anyone else’s audience and that’s actually a really good thing. Things that happen there, generally don’t happen elsewhere (and vice versa), it’s clear that Mecum knows this and they’ve developed their brand around it. Monterey Car Week for them seems to be an avenue to try to reach out to new, high-end consigners and to get their current crop of premium consigners in one place to make deals for other auctions (primarily Kissimmee, where again they are clearly shooting for world domination). As I stated last week, there wasn’t going to be a lot of really headline worthy things to come out of this sale and I think that’s ultimately been proven correct. Their objective is different than everyone else’s up there and I suspect they accomplished what they were looking to do there in 2025.
2025 Cumulative Total: $44.2M
87/91 lots sold: 96% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $508,364
2024 Cumulative Total: $11.4M
82/108 lots sold: 76% sell-through rate
Average Sale Price: $138,846
I’ll be the first to admit, I love it when I’m wrong. Being wrong is almost always a vehicle to learning something or the result of somebody that I’ve underestimated overperforming and doing something bigger and better than I thought they were capable of. Either outcome is undeniably positive. Coming into Monterey 2025, Bonhams Cars Quail Lodge auction was by far the biggest question mark for me and candidly, it’s probably the one that I watched most closely because of this. Cars got announced really late (if they even initially appeared on the website at all), marketing was minimal and what did appear wasn’t great and nobody knew if they were even going to show up as late as a couple of weeks prior to the sale kicking off. It’s really easy to say that the ball got dropped here and that a pretty solid degree of dysfunction was likely going to be the inevitable result. The first hour or so of the sale looked like this was likely going to fall into the foregone conclusion category for certain. It was pretty obvious that there was a significant degree of disorganization happening early on in this sale. Staff was clearly having difficulty creating sight lines and communication wasn’t where it needed to be. I also suspect there may have been some technical issues at some point behind the scenes, but the beginning of the sale definitely looked difficult.
Towards the middle however, everything clicked and fell into place and the redemption arc was inspiring to say the least. For me, it looked as though the turning point was really the 2022 Apollo Intensa Emozione “Ocean Dragon” sale and from that point forward, Bonhams was humming. Out of the ashes, their team managed to pull together what I think is probably their best all-around sale in the last 6-7 years. The results confirm this too. Keep in mind, there was no big lead car to rely on in this one (IE no crazy Ferrari race cars) and although, they did have some good cars and they had a lot of no reserve offerings, Bonham’s nearly $50 million haul at The Quail this year was absolutely the result of their team pulling together, working hard and grinding this thing out like professionals.
I think there’s two notables in particular that deserve high praise here:
2. Bonhams Cars Consignment Team
I can hear all the critics chirping away right now: “The only reason that Bonhams did so well is because they had so many no reserve hypercars”. Sure, that’s probably a fair statement, but let’s look at the bigger picture here: Bonham’s Cars consignment team was able to go out in the world, with basically no assets and secure a whole bunch of seven figure hypercars and then convince the consigner(s) to run them at no reserve with them (as opposed to everyone else, who was clearly spending way more money and looked way more prepared). This speaks to nothing but hard work, customer service and their team’s ability to produce trust. With everything else going on in Monterey this year, they built relationships that were good enough to produce no reserve inventory that was sellable at market prices or better and nothing about that is easy to do. They deserve a lot of credit for this.
2. Bonhams Cars Auctioneer Briony Harford:
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for long enough, you know that I have high praise Briony Harford. I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say that she is the second-best collector transportation oriented auctioneer in the world currently (nobody’s better than Charlie at Gooding). This was on full display at The Quail this week. There’s no question that she had an undeniably difficult first shift on the block, but when she returned for round two, she was a different person entirely, she totally owned the room and is without a doubt responsible for a huge percentage of the results achieved at their Monterey sale this year. Again, the turning point was really the Apollo Hypercar and on that lot in particular, she took what was arguably a dead room onto her back and by the end of that lot had everyone singing Happy Birthday to the winning bidder. That’s one of those auction moments that if you’re a real fan of the art form, you put in your pocket and you remember for a long time.
I’ve personally been in situations on an auction block where things aren’t going well, the crowd can feel it and when you lose momentum, sales plummet. Digging yourself out of that hole is an extraordinarily difficult task and she performed it pretty heroically. It’s really nice to see her on larger stages and I expect they’ll only get bigger from here. She more than proved she’s worthy.
In addition to results alone, this was an important outing for this company. There’s a lot of talented people over there right now and they’re capable of doing a lot. They’ve got the bread, they’ve got the cheese, they just need to dial in the sauce and they’re really onto something good. Looking forward to seeing them in the desert in a few months for sure (hopefully with a lot more pre-preparation this time…..).
Once again, here’s how each auction house placed coming out of Monterey 2025:
- RM Sotheby’s ($163.8 Million)
- Gooding Christie’s ($119.1 Millon)
- Broad Arrow Auctions ($49.8 Million)
- Bonhams ($44.2 Million)
- Mecum ($37.3 Million)
Moving Forward
There’s very little negative that came out in the marketplace this week. I think everybody sort of collectively expected that retro supercars and late model exotics were going to take the lead and that’s exactly what happened. The big concern for a lot of people however (including myself), was what was going to happen with mid-century classics, which have been the staple of this marketplace now for quite some time. Sure, there were cars that conceivably underperformed (Ferrari 275s I would say did a little bit less than what people were expecting) or are completely flat overall (I think 300 SLs and GT350s are good examples of this as well as later Series 1 E-types – these cars just kind of cost what they cost now), but we finally saw the first million-dollar Dino (at Gooding Christie’s), we saw a pretty big price for a Yenko Camaro (at RM Sotheby’s) and a good portion of mid-century star cars hit their marks or better.
Another interesting component of Monterey this year was the returning relevance of the no reserve tag. I’ve said here for quite a while now that I thought that incoming collectors and enthusiasts were a little bit less excited by no reserve cars than previous generations were and as we’ve seen a lot over the last year or so, when things aren’t going well, that’s not the momentum builder that auction houses have relied on for so long anymore. It was a little bit of a different deal here however. Of course, lesser cars still struggled when presented this way, but high-quality cars with desirable options that came to the block with this universally did market correct numbers or better. Not sure if this trend holds, but it was nice to see this.
Overall, I think this week is largely what the collector car market needed. Sure, the lower end of the market is not really in play in Monterey, but the issue for the last few years has been that neither the high-end, nor the low end was engaged and that was bringing this market to a screeching halt. It’s clear now that at least the high end is back, comfortable opening their wallets and ready to play once more.
Hopefully this momentum can carry into 2026.
On to Arizona……
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge