The Quail Is the Highlight of Monterey Car Week
For billionaire car collectors, Monterey Car Week each August is the ultimate event in the world, a rollicking celebration of excellence, commerce, charity, and glamorous camaraderie. There are more than 85,000 attendees, four vintage car rallies, seven auctions, with revenues of more than $400,000,000, thank you very much.
If the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is the Kentucky Derby of automobiles, the Quail is its younger, hipper, more exclusive Woodstock, a meandering, discerning festival of food, wine, music, programs, and, of course, cars, swag, and auto-centric-must-have merch. For the past several years, and, now, boldly woven in the fabric of the week’s culture, The Quail is the one to watch.
“The Quail is a happening!” exclaimed pre-war French auto queen Merle Mullin, over Ruinart bubbles at an exclusive annual supper given by perennial best-in-classers Kasey and Peter McCoy. A “happening” indeed-250 show cars for competition, 6,500 guests from around the globe-a who’s who of movie icons, style setters, socialites, car-world dynasties, Internationals, hand-picked sponsors, and exhibitors de trop.
Donning their chicest finery, the Quail’s swells wander the commandeered golf fairways to peruse the vintage coupes, phaetons, drop heads, touring cars, muscle cars, the odd V16, as well as the concept cars, and latest never-before-seen models from today’s manufacturers.
To top it off, there were six live bands, and so much delicious food that I made an unabashed glutton of myself: I won’t write how many stops I made to the “Caviar and Champagne” tent or the gossamer pavilions of copious, superb excerpts from Peninsula Hotels’ best dining rooms. As for the Quail, make no mistake: with one day’s revenues of more than $20,000,000, this “happening” is big business, to be sure.
David Sydorick, whose 1937 Alfa Romeo made off with this year's coveted "Best-in-Show" at the Concours, says of the Quail and its sorcery, "Yes. Michael did all that."
Sir Michael Kadoorie, the charismatic elder statesman, heir, visionary of today's Peninsula Hotels-and storied car collector himself-sketched out the Quail, now in its 16th year, as a tonic to the storied, more formal dowager, the Concours.
Like the hotels he owns and runs, Sir Michael and his impeccable team imagined the Quail's every detail in its characteristic Kadoorie DNA: uncompromising, unapologetic, first class. It seems fitting the next car event he's conjuring this coming winter in Paris is called, "The Best of the Best," a lollapalooza of show winners from similar-if there are any-auto events around the world.
My visit to this year's Quail began appropriately, albeit lavishly, in Beverly Hills with the Black Badge Wraith in Salamanca Blue-a $450,000, 12 cylinder, personal luxury car, the fastest Rolls Royce ever made. Despite its speed and finesse, the Wraith is no sports car-it's a well-honed symphony of luxury and style whose road-commanding, stately presence rarely goes unenvied by fellow drivers, pedestrians, gas attendants, or valet parkers.
En route to and from the Monterey Peninsula, I squired the Wraith along twists and turns of the most majestic road in America-Highway 1 from Big Sur to Carmel, with its never-failing-to-gobsmack views of the Pacific and the cliffs leading down to it. The six-plus hours of road time from Los Angeles seemed but a necessary pause-point in utter ecstasy, the very "Spirit of Ecstasy," as Rolls' hood statue is called.
But, with all this headiness, there's one thing that remains real, grounded, and perfectly clear in my vision of the mirage that is a week there: unlike the art world, the horse world, the golf world, still (and paradoxically) the car world is made of ladies and gentlemen. I am sure it's a golden age that will change as the stakes get higher and higher, but for now there's a community of collectors who are friends, who are genuinely happy for each other, happy to see each other's other-worldly vehicles, happy to cheer, happy to participate, happy just to be there whether they win or lose.
When, like a tsunami, Anne Brockington Lee's 1953 Lancia "Aurelia" devastated the Quail's "Best-in-Show" category, a Dutch collector grandee-herself no stranger to the Circle of Champions-whispered, "darling, of course Anne won. She simply has the best cars."
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