Car Week Car Spotting
Sometimes you find a McLaren P1 GTR chilling in a public parking garage.
Car Week is about cars, all the time, cars. Officially organized events dot the landscape of the Monterey Peninsula, and these days, there are too many to track and attend. We arrived in Monterey with more invites and press badges than time in the day. It became clear from that Friday morning that we would have to prioritize a few events to see for sure, but at some point, we just had to see what we could see. In some cases that meant a structured show, sometimes a parking lot and sometimes it just meant we had to pull over and take in the rolling show that are the streets and roads of Monterey, Carmel, Pacific Grove and Seaside.
We've always enjoyed the hunt of finding something on the street, unrestricted there for the whole world to see. We have also made it it habit to stalk the various public and hotel garages in and around Monterey as often they reveal amazing finds. We love invites to exclusive events with glossy catalogs and complimentary food and snacks. Why else get into the digital media business (blogging for your commoners) if you can't get free snacks? Yet, even today the biggest excitement is the hunt on public streets and in hidden garages for those rare unicorns. Some of our greatest finds in the super and hypercar world have come from stalking of the streets during car week, or the just plain dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time.
It's not just walking the streets either. Car Week brings tens of thousands of people to an area where the roads can barely handle the local population, so traffic is in full beast mode. A traffic jam during car week isn't your normal commuter nightmare as it's common to get stuck in traffic with the very same cars you set out to stalk in the first place.
The photos range from cars on public roads or in unattended and completely accessible garages. Some of these photos are from organized events such as Exotics on Cannery Row or Casa Ferrari set up by Ferrari of North America. The key characteristic of all of these cars is that they were found for free and didn't require any special press access, meaning that anyone with a little patience and drive to to hunt can find these during car week. If you've always wanted to try Car Week, but you're not ready to drop the dough for tickets to the various events, we highly recommend that you don't need to buy a ticket to get your moneys worth. We'd put an afternoon sitting in front of a coffee shop on Ocean Avenue in Carmel during Car Week up against any meet-up, car show or auction in the world....anywhere! Our necks are still sore from all the head turning we did to capture these images.
