Yahoo Finance Monterey Car Week: Unrestored Bugatti wins top honors; auction action hits speed bump; new luxe cars debut
CARMEL, Calif. — Monterey Car Week in Pebble Beach ended yesterday with a bang.
For the first time, a “preservation class” car won top honors at Sunday’s Pebble Beach Concours, a 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports factory race car. Preservation class vehicles are generally unrestored and show their age, blemishes and all.
With a Bugatti win, Pebble Beach Concours said the French luxury brand and Mercedes are now tied with the most Best of Show awards at the competition, with 10 wins apiece.
But it wasn’t just a rare Bugatti making all the headlines at the show, where upwards of 80,000 people attended a myriad of events. Auction drama, new car debuts, and “bespoke” customizations were on full display.
A sizeable auctions miss
The biggest auto auctioneers in the world — RM Sotheby's, Mecum, Bonhams, and the official auctioneer of Pebble Beach, Gooding & Company — were expecting a big week, but the final tallies in the industry whiffed.
Classic car insurer Hagerty, which also owns Broad Arrow Auctions, estimated an average of $459 million would come in across all auction houses. However, the final tally came in much lower, at $391.6 million including post-auction sales, down 3% versus a year ago ($403.3 million).
“[Saturday’s final auctions] continued the themes of Thursday and Friday with vintage $1 million plus vehicles selling poorly while modern vehicles in that price range enjoyed a steady sell-through rate,” the company said in a statement.
Hagerty flagged that the sell-through rate (successfully sold at auction) for the $1 million+ vehicles tumbled to 52% from 63% a year ago, with the average overall sell-through rate this year coming in 71%. While it’s a bad sign, it may also indicate owners of these vehicles are not rushing to sell either.
Anecdotally, auction watchers told Yahoo Finance many vehicles in the $3 million to $5 million range did not garner the interest they typically do, whereas modern classics, in particular American cars in the $250,000- $500,000 range, sold better. Hagerty also found that modern cars (4 years old or newer) woth $500K+, sold better at auction with a 73% sell-through rate.
Some industry watchers are concerned that the classic car market, one of the biggest alternative asset classes in the world, may be correcting from recent highs. Nevertheless, here are the top five biggest sales this year, per Hagerty’s calculations:
1960 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider — $17,055,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Lungo Spider — $14,030,000 (Gooding & Company)
1955 Ferrari 410 Sport Spider — $12,985,000 (RM Sotheby’s)
1969 Ford GT40 Lightweight — $7,865,000 (Mecum)
1997 Porsche 911 GT1 Rennversion Coupe — $7,045,000 (Broad Arrow Auctions)
New car debuts in the spotlight
Ostensibly, Monterey Car Week has long been about priceless vintage cars that ooze yearning for a bygone era. Don’t tell that to current automakers though. Automakers Lamborghini, Porsche, and Lincoln showed off new products to the many ultra-high-net-worth attendees in town.
The biggest buzz came from Lamborghini (VWAGY) with its Huracán supercar successor, the 900+hp hybrid-powered Temerario.
CEO Stephan Winkelmann told Yahoo Finance that the hybrid powertrain's ability to reduce emissions through its battery system and improve performance with the electric motors is “the right direction for Lamborghini.”
On the other side of the luxury space, Lincoln (F) held a private event for its clientele to show off the new Navigator full-size SUV. The Navigator, an important vehicle for Lincoln, has been a top seller for Ford’s luxury brand and is where much of the tech trickles down to its other vehicles. It also has to compete with Cadillac’s cash cow, the Escalade SUV.
Lincoln’s been on a hot streak lately, with its Nautilus midsize SUV gaining some surprising buzz due to a catchy song in its ads and a tech-forward cabin.
One of the wildest debuts was for a special-edition Porsche that isn't exactly a Porsche. UK-based bespoke automaker, race car builder, and Porsche specialist Tuthill unveiled its GT One at the Quail Event, an homage to Porsche’s GT1 race car built from the ground up to be a road-going supercar.
The company will only build 22 of the cars, which each require about 3,500 hours to build and will likely cost millions of dollars.
Customization, customization, customization
The Tuthill GT One wasn’t the only big reveal or custom Porsche announced this week. Gunther Werks, Singer, and other small, low-volume manufacturers showed off creations that used older Porsche 911s as a base and then customized them.
The Porsche customization and “restomod” — a portmanteau of “restoration and modification” — industry is growing so fast and lining up such impressive million-dollar commissions that even Porsche is getting in on the action.
Porsche unveiled a one-off 911 Speedster based on the older 993-era 911, a project that was fueled by an important client who wanted this particular vehicle in his collection. Porsche never made a 911 Speedster during this era of the 911, but the company is getting more and more requests from its clients for custom work like this.
Porsche, through its Sonderwunsch, or “special wishes,” program, is doing just that, and the company intends to invest and do more of these one-off projects. It's also investing in its Classics program, in which it restores older cars with the aim of creating another revenue stream for the company.
“We are offering these one-off cars for customers, and we are working already on five other projects,” Alexander Fabig, Porsche VP of Individualization and Classic, said to Yahoo Finance. “At the moment, we are working and enhancing also our capacities because we see a strong demand and a desire to create such cars, and we have a quite interesting variety in different model lines and different topics.”
Rolls-Royce (BMWYY), the granddaddy of bespoke and “coach-built” (akin to one-off) creations, is leaning even more into custom-built autos, which leads to fatter profit margins. New Rolls CEO Chris Brownridge told Yahoo Finance that its vehicles are more works of art or luxury goods than autos.
“It's much more than personalization, it's much more than color and trim. It's about a deep engagement with the client and having the agility and flexibility to produce something which is truly unique,” Brownridge said. ”So it's like a masterpiece; the fact it's got wheels is incidental."
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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