Good morning. Today the Monterey Peninsula prices American history twice before dinner. This afternoon, a red Hemi Cuda — one of 59 four-speed hardtops ever built — rolls across Mecum's block, exactly as promised on Wednesday. This evening, a few miles up the coast, the only Daytona Coupe Carroll Shelby ever kept for himself goes hunting the biggest number any American car has ever brought at public auction. And the first real results from Thursday night are already on the scoreboard, which means the week's big question — record or expensive game of pass — has its first honest data point.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

On the desk this morning: the homework we assigned ourselves Wednesday. A 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda crosses Mecum's block this afternoon as Lot F135, carrying an estimate of $850,000 to $900,000.

Of every Barracuda built in 1971, just 59 hardtops left the factory with the 426 Hemi and a four-speed together, and this is one of them: original body panels, a restoration done with new-old-stock parts, the A33 Track Pak with a 3.54 Sure Grip out back, the shaker hood up front, and a Dave Wise inspection report vouching for all of it.

Two numbers frame this one. The first is 1971 itself — the final model year of the street Hemi, killed by emissions rules, insurance surcharges, and the industry-wide retreat from compression (more on the engine downstairs). Whatever 426-powered E-bodies exist is all there will ever be, and the four-speed hardtops are the thinnest slice of that. The second number is January's: a 1971 Hemi Cuda convertible opened the 2026 auction season at Mecum Kissimmee by selling for $3.3 million with fees — money that used to belong exclusively to Italian exotics. The convertibles are the unicorns (a dozen built in 1971), but that result told every hardtop owner in America that the top of the Hemi market woke up hungry this year.

The tents opened Thursday, and the first verdict is already in. Bonhams' gamble — leaving the Quail after 23 years for a debut sale at Laguna Seca — sold cars: the headline 2024 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, a 1/80 Sur Mesure longtail, brought $4.57M, and a 1/80 Lamborghini Diablo GT made $2.425M.

Now, tonight's card — because Thursday was the undercard. Gooding Christie's opens its Pebble Beach sale this evening, and Lot 39 is the week's main event: the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe, chassis CSX2300, estimated in excess of $25 million. The record math is simple and brutal. The most expensive American car ever sold at public auction is the 1935 Duesenberg SSJ, at $22 million on this same peninsula in 2018 — a record that itself was taken from CSX2000, the first Cobra, at $13.75 million in 2016. Tonight, a Shelby tries to take the title back from the car that took it away. CSX2300's case: one of six Daytona Coupes, the only one that kept racing (in Japan, through 1968) after the factory program ended, and the only one Carroll Shelby personally owned — for 23 years.

Why it matters to you:

The car upstairs is worth the better part of a million dollars substantially because of the shape of a hole. Here's the engineering, in plain English.

The shape. "Hemi" is short for hemispherical combustion chamber — the space above the piston is half a dome instead of the usual shallow wedge. That dome buys you three things at once. First, valve area: with the intake and exhaust valves tilted away from each other on opposite slopes of the dome, you can fit enormous valves that would never coexist on one flat surface — and airflow is horsepower. Second, breathing geometry: intake charge enters one side, exhaust leaves the other, a clean crossflow path with no U-turns. Third, the spark plug sits at the top dead center of the dome, so the flame travels the same short distance in every direction — fast, even combustion when you're feeding it wide open. This is why the 426 made its reputation at racetracks first: NASCAR in 1964, where it was promptly so dominant the rules had to chase it.

The price of the shape. Nothing is free. Those tilted valves need a comically wide cylinder head with dual rocker shafts to operate them — the 426's heads are why the engine earned the nickname "the elephant," and why it barely fits between the shock towers of anything. Worse, a hemispherical chamber is big, and compression ratio needs the chamber small — so you fill the space with a tall domed piston. Now your flame has to burn around a hill, your piston is heavy, and there's no quench area — the tight squish zone modern chambers use to tumble the mixture and finish combustion cleanly at part throttle. Wide-open at Daytona, none of that matters. At 25% throttle in traffic, with 1970s carburetion, it burns dirty.

Why 1971 was the end. That part-throttle dirtiness is exactly what emissions regulations began measuring. Add insurance surcharges on supercar engines, add the compression drops coming for low-lead fuel, and the street Hemi's six-year run (1966–1971) ended with the model year of the car crossing today. The modern 5.7 and 6.4 "Hemi" V8s that Ram is happily reviving wear the name, not the geometry — their chambers are flattened, with squish zones added and two spark plugs per cylinder to fix the flame-travel problem the shape creates. And the true heir of the original idea isn't a V8 at all: every modern four-valve pent-roof head — two small intakes, two small exhausts, plug dead center — is the hemi's breathing concept, solved with better math and half a century of combustion science.

Five auction houses didn't move onto this peninsula out of romance. Here's the business under the lawn — worth understanding before you read a single weekend result.

The buyer pays the house. At RM Sotheby's, Broad Arrow, and Gooding Christie's this week, the buyer's premium on cars runs 12% on the first $250,000 of hammer price and 10% on everything above it, stacked on top of the winning bid. Run the math on the headliner: if the Daytona Coupe hammers at $25 million tonight, the winning bidder writes a check for roughly $27.5 million — about $2.5 million of which is the house's, on one car, for one evening's work. Automobilia is even richer: 20–25% premiums on the toys and signs.

The number you read includes it. Nearly every "sold for" figure published this weekend — including the ones in this newsletter — is hammer plus premium. Which means when the week's total lands near Hagerty's $470 million midpoint, something like $40-plus million of it never belonged to the sellers at all. The half-billion-dollar week Wednesday's issue described is, among other things, a roughly $45 million fee-revenue week.

The seller negotiates. Entry fees and seller commissions exist, but they're soft. On ordinary consignments a house might take a mid-single-digit commission; on trophy cars, the leverage flips completely. Houses compete for headline lots by cutting the commission to zero and then going further — quietly sharing a slice of the buyer's premium with the consignor, a practice the trade calls an enhanced hammer. On a car like tonight's, the seller can walk away with more than the hammer price. The house accepts a skinny margin on the star because the star fills the tent — and the tent is full of $300,000-to-$2 million lots paying full freight with no negotiating power at all.

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