Monterey Car Week gets most of the headlines, and it earns them. But the calendar for anyone who cares about cars this much doesn’t stop in California, and it doesn’t stop in August. Here’s where else the people who build their year around cars actually show up, from a Miami design district to a Sussex hillclimb to the shores of an Italian lake.
Miami: Exotics In The Open Air
Miami’s car culture runs on a different current than Monterey’s hushed, judged elegance, it’s louder, faster, and built into the city’s identity. The Miami Concours, held in the Miami Design District, brings hypercars, vintage machines, and modern exotics together as rolling art displayed right in the district’s public spaces, no velvet rope required to walk past a seven-figure car.
Away from the organized events, Miami’s exotic-car presence is just part of the scenery, South Beach and Ocean Drive have been a backdrop for Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces for decades, especially during December’s Art Basel season when the city fills up with collectors and creatives alike. On the more grassroots end, local Cars and Coffee meetups, Key Biscayne among them, keep the same no-entry-fee, show-up-with-whatever-you-drive spirit alive that built the format in the first place.
SoCal: The Roads Are The Event
Southern California’s car culture isn’t concentrated into one week, it’s built into the geography. Angeles Crest Highway, cutting through the San Gabriel Mountains, and Mulholland Highway through the Santa Monica Mountains are two of the most storied driving roads in the country, the kind of roads that turn a Sunday morning into a reason to own something fun to drive.
SoCal also has its own concours tradition: the Rodeo Drive Concours d’Elegance in Beverly Hills has run for three decades, traditionally on Father’s Day, turning one of the world’s most famous shopping streets into a one-day outdoor museum. And for a different era entirely, Radwood, the traveling celebration of 1980s and ’90s cars and culture, runs a dedicated SoCal edition, proof that “classic” doesn’t only mean pre-war coachbuilt machines.
One clarification worth making: The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, is often mentioned in the same breath as SoCal events, but it’s actually part of Monterey Car Week, held in Carmel Valley, not a separate Southern California event.
Not every car culture capital needs a single headline event. Sometimes the roads themselves are the destination.
Goodwood, England: Two Events, One Estate
The Goodwood Festival of Speed, running every summer at Goodwood House in West Sussex since 1993, is built around a hillclimb up the estate’s driveway, current and historic Formula 1 cars, rally cars, and road cars all running the same course in front of the crowd, rather than sitting still behind a rope.
A few miles away on the same estate sits the Goodwood Revival, held every autumn since 1998 at Goodwood Motor Circuit, a genuine 1948 racetrack built on a former WWII airfield. The Revival’s rule is strict and part of the appeal: only cars and motorcycles from the circuit’s original racing era (1948 to 1966) compete, and attendees dress the part in period costume. Between the two events, Goodwood covers both ends of what this culture is about: pushing modern machines to their limit, and preserving exactly how it used to be done.
Villa d’Este, Italy: Concours On The Water
On the shores of Lake Como, the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este is judged concours in its purest form, historic and classic automobiles presented at the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este and Villa Erba, alongside a showcase of concept cars from major manufacturers. The tradition traces back to a Lake Como concours dating to 1929, revived in the 1990s and now organized jointly by BMW Group Classic and the Automobile Club, held every spring. It’s regularly named alongside Pebble Beach as one of the most prestigious concours events anywhere in the world, proof that this culture has always been a European export as much as an American one.
The Throughline
Miami, SoCal, Goodwood, Lake Como, different countries, different formats, same instinct: cars this good deserve to be seen, driven, and talked about in person. That’s the calendar we’re roasting coffee around, one region at a time.