This year at the 2022 Monterey Car Week, auction action nearly stole the show from more traditional park-and-show events like the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering. Over 1,000 cars on offer from Bonhams, Gooding and Company, RM Sotheby’s, and Mecum Auctions logged a 78 percent sell-through rate on the way to a record-setting $469 million estimated total—and that figure doesn’t even include a 1998 McLaren F1 sold in secret as part of a new Sotheby’s Sealed process.
For context, the previous high came back in 2015, when the auction houses logged a combined $394.5 million. The new record arrived this year despite many experts predicting a slump or, at least, a plateau compared to previous summers at Monterey.
“We were watching for a slowdown,” says Brian Rabold, Hagerty VP, Valuation Services, on the 18th fairway at Pebble. “At Hagerty, we’ve seen a few signs of that coming up and we weren’t sure if that was going to extend into the sales this year. But it didn’t seem to be the case at all.”
In 2022, a total of 113 cars broke the seven-figure mark and many set individual world records, including a 1990 Ferrari F40 at nearly $4 million, a 1994 Bugatti EB110 Super Sport at $3.16 million, a Ferrari Enzo at $4.13 million, and Mike Tyson’s former 1995 Ferrari F50 at $4.625 million.
“I think there were two themes that emerged,” Rabold explained. “One was classic blue-chip collectible cars from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s—really rare, special cars did very well. The other part is this continuation of what we referred to as analog supercars, a lot of the halo cars from the ’90s and early 2000s, like your Ferrari F40s, F50s, Bugatti EB110s setting record prices. In some cases, setting a record earlier in the day, then that record getting broken later in the afternoon.”
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