Good morning. Somewhere on the Monterey Peninsula right now, a person in white gloves is wiping morning fog off a $25 million Shelby, and somewhere else a very tired logistics coordinator is explaining to a security guard why a Bugatti can't just "park anywhere." Monterey Car Week is underway, the gavels start falling tomorrow — and before the peninsula gets loud, there's a silver V12 with a chrome shift gate asking a very good question about what honest miles are worth.

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

Let’s roll.

On the desk this morning: a 2000 Ferrari 550 Maranello, fresh on Bring a Trailer and showing 41,000 miles. Argento Nurburgring over Nero Connolly leather, a gated six-speed manual, and the 5.5-liter F133A V12 making 485 horsepower — plus the part 550 shoppers actually scroll for, a September 2025 timing belt service that touched belts, water pump belt, tensioners, plugs, and fuel pumps. Delivered new through Ferrari of Beverly Hills with a $221,688 window sticker, it's now on dealer consignment in Florida with records, a tool kit, and a clean Carfax. The auction closes this afternoon at 3:30pm EST.

Why this car matters: the 550 was Ferrari returning to the front-engined V12 two-seater formula for the first time since the Daytona bowed out in 1973 — and every one of the 3,083 built came with three pedals and a chrome gate, because there was no other option. As the analog-V12 era gets canonized, 550s have climbed from depreciated-exotic money to blue chip, with the benchmark prices set almost entirely by low-mileage examples. This one has triple the miles of those cars, and a paper trail arguing every one of them was earned honestly.

Monterey Car Week runs through Sunday's 75th Pebble Beach Concours, and five auction houses will sell somewhere north of a thousand vehicles between Thursday and Saturday. The cars get the photographs. The real estate got the drama.

After 23 years of selling at Quail Lodge, Bonhams packed up and moved its Thursday sale to WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, setting up shop inside the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. Broad Arrow — four years old as a Monterey presence — walked straight into the ground Bonhams vacated and became the official auction partner of The Quail, where it will run roughly 175 cars across Thursday and Friday. RM Sotheby's holds the longest program with three consecutive evening sessions at the Monterey Conference Center, and Mecum brings the biggest docket by far: roughly 600 cars plus about 100 vintage motorcycles at the Del Monte Golf Course.

That's the venue chess. Here's the metal. Gooding Christie's carries the week's headliner, the 1964 Shelby Daytona Coupe CSX2300, estimated north of $25 million. RM counters with the Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato at $12–15 million and Corvette Grand Sport 003 at $11–13 million — and here's the wild part: neither a Daytona Coupe nor a Grand Sport has crossed a public auction block since 2009. Broad Arrow answers with the Bugatti W16 Mistral at $8–10 million. Mecum, never one for restraint, shows up with a 4,500-mile Ferrari F50 (a sister car made $12.21 million at Kissimmee in January), a 589-mile Enzo, and a freshly restored Carrera GT.

And parked quietly in Mecum's Friday docket sits a red-over-black 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda — one of 59 four-speed hardtops ever built, numbers-matching, estimated at $850–900K. It crosses the block Friday afternoon, which happens to be the afternoon after your Friday issue arrives. We'll put it on the desk then. Bring coffee.

Half the cars in this issue — the S/T, the F50, the Carrera GT, the gated-manual V12 sitting on the desk upstairs — share one trait the market keeps paying multiples for: a naturally aspirated engine with no forced-induction crutch. Here's why nobody builds the high-revving version anymore, in three acts.

Act one: what revs actually cost. The brutal metric is mean piston speed — stroke length times two, times engine speed. The GT3-family 4.0 flat-six at 9,000 rpm pushes its pistons at an average of roughly 24 meters per second, which is Le Mans prototype territory, in a car with a warranty and cupholders. Surviving that means a valvetrain with almost no moving mass (Porsche switched to rigid finger followers instead of bucket tappets precisely to chase this), titanium connecting rods, individual throttle bodies for response, and tolerances that make normal production engines look like farm equipment. Every one of those choices costs real money and buys you exactly zero horsepower on a spec sheet.

Act two: why the accountants won. A turbocharger delivers the same peak power from less displacement, with a fat torque plateau where customers actually drive, better cycle-average emissions, and an easier path through particulate filters and drive-by noise regulations. A high-strung naturally aspirated engine does its best work in the last 2,000 rpm — the exact region emissions test cycles barely visit and regulators increasingly frown at. When the engineering brief is "hit the numbers for the least money," the turbo wins every single time. So it did.

Act three: why the market noticed. The F50's V12 traces its architecture to Ferrari's Formula 1 program. The Carrera GT's V10 began life as a racing project. The S/T's flat-six is the last of a bloodline Porsche openly admits has no successor logic under coming regulations. These engines aren't scarce because of a marketing department's production cap — they're scarce because the industrial capability to justify building them is being retired. Nobody is tooling up a new 9,000-rpm naturally aspirated engine program. What exists is what will ever exist.

Hagerty's forecast for this week's Monterey auctions puts the midpoint at $470 million — just shy of the all-time record — with an optimistic case of $496 million. If bidding runs hot, the week could clear half a billion dollars for the first time ever. Champagne, right?

Read the footnote first. Hagerty's own analysis says the growth is coming almost entirely from more seven- and eight-figure cars being consigned this year — not from broad market strength or more cars overall. The top of the market is doing the lifting alone.

Because the rest of the market is telling a very different story. Per Hagerty's June data, the global average auction sale price is up 22% year over year to $75K — while the median crawled up just 2% to $26.9K. When the average sprints and the median walks, that's not a rising tide; that's a handful of enormous boats. Meanwhile, private sales activity has sunk to its weakest reading in over five years, with the average private sale price at its lowest point in 14 months.

And there's a cautionary tale on file. In 2024, the Monterey forecast midpoint was $459 million; the week actually delivered $391.6 million. The miss wasn't the headline cars whiffing — it was sell-through. Seven-figure lots in the $1–5 million band cleared at just 57% against a forecast of 66%, and that nine-point gap alone vaporized about $58 million from the total.

That's the lap for today. The tents are up, the fog will burn off, and by Friday morning there will be numbers where estimates used to be.

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