What Did Monterey 2026 Tell Us About the Collector-Car Market?

by Mike Gulett – 

Every August the collector-car world visits the Monterey Peninsula to see and hear beautiful cars, visit with old friends, spend lots of money and discover what their cars are worth.

Monterey Car Week is an annual referendum on the collector-car market and this year it may have told us something important. The collector-car market is changing and perhaps the definition of a desirable collector car is changing with it.

The Big Number

The auction numbers from Monterey this year were very interesting. Depending on which sales and charity lots are included, the Monterey auctions totaled to about three-quarters of a billion dollars. Hagerty counted 853 cars sold across the five major auctions for a record $755.6 million, compared with $432.7 million in 2025. The average sale this year was a quite high $885,765. The sell-through rate was about 76 percent—essentially unchanged from recent years. So buyers didn’t decide this year that every collector car was worth more money than before. However, they did decide that certain cars were worth a lot more money.

The Market Is More Selective

We are accustomed to thinking about the collector-car market in categories; Ferraris are going up, muscle cars are going down, prewar cars are dying etc…

But Monterey 2026 is pointing out that those broad categories aren’t as useful as before. Buyers now appear increasingly willing to pay high prices for a special car while having little enthusiasm for an ordinary example.

Being old and rare isn’t enough to command high prices. A car needs a reason for someone to desperately want it: important history and provenance for example.

The Top

The headline sales were fascinating. A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe sold at Gooding Christie’s for $42.905 million (the highest price for an American car ever), a 1996 McLaren F1 GTR brought $34.655 million at RM Sotheby’s, a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport sold for $18.705 million (a Corvette record), a 1996 Ferrari F50 brought $14.575 million at Mecum and a Ferrari 288 GTO hit $11.555 million. Many other record prices were set.

What makes all these cars so special? They are unmistakable — the new owners do not need to explain why a Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe matters or any of the other top sellers. These cars all have stories, good stories and collectors love these stories.

The Younger Cars

There was a significant increase in the number of cars made in 1990 or later at the auctions this year. Late model supercars were among the strongest performers of the week. Manual-transmission Ferraris were especially hot. A six-speed Ferrari F430 sold for $841,000, while a manual 575 Superamerica reached $1.38 million.

Many of us remember seeing these cars when they were new and may still think of them as modern cars. The market now thinks of them as collector cars.

Another generation of collectors has arrived, their poster cars when they were young were Ferrari F40s and F50s, McLaren F1s, Porsche Carrera GTs, Ferrari Enzos, Ford GTs and Lamborghini Murciélagos. And maybe Ferrari 360s, Porsche 996s, BMW Z8s and Aston Martin Vanquishes lower on the price ladder.

These cars are the classics of a new generation — the older classics are not going away it just means the definition of classic cars is now bigger.

Traditional Classics?

The Monterey 2026 results do not support the theory that young cars are replacing old cars. Good prewar cars actually sold very well. It was reported that 143 prewar cars sold for $102.6 million, with an 84 percent sell-through rate—the highest of any era.

What may be moderating instead is demand for the ordinary old collector car. Because a great Duesenberg is still a great Duesenberg, a significant competition Ferrari remains desirable and a Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe is now worth more than $40 million. This year’s results may mean that simply being a decent European sports car from the 1950s or 1960s doesn’t necessarily guarantee strong bidding anymore.

And this is where demographics likely come into play; the cars that once had a large number of enthusiasts who remembered them when new are slowly losing those potential buyers.

The truly great examples will still be sought after and the normal ones may attract less attention.

For years, rising collector-car values could lift entire categories but maybe not so much anymore. Monterey 2026 suggests that buyers would rather pay a premium for something very special than buy a mediocre car only because it belongs to the same category.

What Can We Learn From Monterey 2026?

Here are five things:

1. There is still a lot of money in the collector-car world.
2. That money is becoming more and more selective.
3. The 1980s through early 2000s have now entered the serious collector market.
4. Truly special older automobiles aren’t going away simply because their original admirers are aging.
5. The middle of the market may become much more difficult.

The future may belong to significant cars, independent of age; cars with important and interesting stories that represent something that cannot be easily found somewhere else.

Collectors are becoming more discriminating and maybe the collector car market is deciding what it wants to collect next.

Let us know what you think in the Comments.

 

Research and some text by ChatGPT. Unless otherwise noted photos by Mike Gulett.