If you live inside the Del Monte Forest, Car Week is not the Sunday you read about in the glossies. It is the Thursday morning your usual coffee run gets rerouted, the Wednesday afternoon a low-slung parade rolls past Casa Palmero, and the string of evenings when the Lodge courtyards fill with people who flew in for a single lawn. The 75th anniversary edition arrives August 7 to 16, 2026, and the shape of those nine days matters more to a homeowner here than any auction result.
The good news, if you know the rhythm, is that most of the Forest stays remarkably legible. Certain roads belong to the cars on certain hours. Certain restaurants belong to guests with credentials. And a surprising amount of the interior, the trails, the fire pits, the quieter tables, stays yours if you time it right. Here is how the week actually reads from a Pebble Beach front door.
The Thursday you will feel first
Mark August 13 on the fridge. That is Tour d'Elegance day, and it is the morning that reorganizes 17-Mile Drive around a single procession. Cars line up on Portola Road in Pebble Beach starting at 7:00 am, the Tour departs at 9:30 am, and returns to Pebble Beach around 12:00 pm. The route traces 17-Mile Drive, Highway One to Big Sur, and then loops back to cross the Finish line at Pebble Beach, and a car that completes the Tour gets the nod if it later ties in class competition at the Concours.
That last detail matters. Entrants have a competitive incentive to actually drive, which means the field this year will be full rather than symbolic. More than 150 Concours entrants participate. If your errands take you south of the Gate on Thursday morning, plan them for before six or after one. If you want the free spectator experience, the staging on Portola between 7:00 and 9:30 is the highest density of cars you will see all week without a ticket.
The Wednesday tell that most residents miss
The day before the Tour is the quieter overture. The Pebble Beach Motoring Classic parades in from a 1,500-mile drive down from Kirkland, Washington, arriving at Casa Palmero on Wednesday, August 12, around 3 pm. It is not a public event in the ticketed sense, but the arrival is visible, unhurried, and one of the more photogenic moments of the week if you happen to be near the Palmero grounds late that afternoon.
Wednesday is also the first day the Forest's interior traffic changes character. Trailers stage. Concours entrants trickle into hotel driveways. The Lodge motor court shifts from resort to green room.
What Sunday looks like from your driveway
The show itself, the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, runs Sunday, August 16. If you have never actually been, the timing surprises most residents:
Dawn: Show field opens to car entrants. 5:30 am: Show field opens to spectators with a credential. 8:00 am: Judging commences. 1:30 pm to 5:00 pm: Awards Ceremony and Live Show.
This means the 18th fairway is functionally active from before sunrise. If you walk your dog anywhere near the Lodge on a normal Sunday morning, understand that the neighborhood is a different animal by 5:30. The upside is that the show ends earlier than most people expect. Once the awards wrap around five, the Forest starts to exhale.
The 75th brings its own weight. Ferrari is the primary featured marque, with a special focus on Chinetti and NART competition cars, Vignale is the featured coachbuilder, and new classes include Early American Speedsters, Classic Streamliners, and Japanese Motorsports. The event is also paying tribute to its road-racing origins, with the first Pebble Beach Road Race having taken place in November 1950 and Concours cars originally paraded down the start-finish straight of a racecourse laid out in Del Monte Forest. That racing history ran through the Forest itself, which is a detail worth mentioning to anyone who thinks the Concours has always been a lawn show.
Tickets are not incidental this year. Starting August 1, 2026, the price of general admission tickets increases to $650.
The evenings that stay yours
Here is the piece most Car Week coverage misses. The Inn at Spanish Bay runs a set of standing programs all week that are essentially unchanged by the automotive circus. If you want an evening that feels like a normal Pebble Beach summer, this is where to point out-of-town guests who are visiting for reasons unrelated to horsepower:
- The Spanish Bay bagpiper plays at the fire pits every evening from 5:45 pm to 6:30 pm.
- Live jazz by the fireplace at The Inn at Spanish Bay every Thursday through Saturday, 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm.
- Live blues, drinks and bites every Saturday from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm.
None of those hours coincide with the peak choke points of the Tour or the Sunday show field. The fire pit at 5:45 on Concours Sunday, in particular, catches the Forest at its most decompressed moment of the week.
The resort dining rooms also flag a resident-friendly note earlier in the summer. Dining specials at Roy's, Pèppoli, and Traps are offered on June 21, 2026, for families and friends, which is the Father's Day window and one of the last relatively unbooked weekends before the automotive calendar takes over.
The edges of the Forest, and what you can safely skip
A homeowner does not need to attend every satellite to feel like a participant. It helps, though, to know which events are pulling traffic off which roads.
Friday, August 14, is The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, at Quail Lodge. Saturday, August 15, is loaded: Exotics on Broadway takes over Seaside as the largest single-day show of the week. Concorso Italiano runs the same Saturday, and the Monterey Motorsports Festival lights up the Monterey County Fairgrounds from 5 pm to 11 pm. WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca hosts the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion August 12 to 15, 2026.
For a Pebble Beach resident, the practical read is that Highway 68 between the Forest and Laguna Seca will be slow to unpredictable those four days, and Carmel Valley Road will thicken every time The Quail lets out. If you have a Friday tee time at Spyglass or a Saturday lunch reservation in Carmel, leave earlier than you think you need to.
The city also runs a shuttle system worth knowing about even if you never board one. Park in Carmel-by-the-Sea and take a shuttle to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance on Sunday for $40 per person unlimited or $20 one way, with children under 12 free, departing every 15 to 30 minutes from 8 am to 6 pm from Carmel Plaza. Its real value to a resident is that it absorbs a meaningful share of the guest traffic that would otherwise be trying to self-park inside the Forest. Point your visitors to it.
The July prelude worth putting on the calendar
Before any of this, the Forest has its own quieter July moment. The Monterey City Amateur returns to Del Monte Golf Course July 3 to 5, 2026. Del Monte, the oldest course west of the Mississippi still in continuous operation, tends to get overlooked in a Forest that includes Pebble, Spyglass, and Spanish Bay. The Fourth of July weekend tournament is the kind of local rhythm that reminds you why you bought here in the first place, and it happens six weeks before anyone starts unloading a Ferrari onto the 18th fairway.
The nine-day map, in one line
If you take one thing from all of the above, take this. Wednesday August 12 is the Motoring Classic arrival at Casa Palmero. Thursday August 13 is the Tour on 17-Mile Drive, seven to noon. Friday and Saturday belong to The Quail, Concorso, and Laguna Seca, which pull traffic off the Forest more than they add to it. Sunday August 16 is the Concours, dawn to five, and by six the fire pits at Spanish Bay are the calmest square footage on the peninsula.
For homeowners who prefer to lease their Forest residences during the week and be elsewhere, or for owners who want their property presented to a discerning short-term guest, the concentration of demand is unlike any other stretch of the year. Tim Allen Luxury Rentals curates and manages estate-scale homes across Pebble Beach with the discretion the week requires. Get in touch with our Luxury Rentals concierge to talk through timing, presentation, and the quiet mechanics of hosting well during the busiest nine days of the Pebble Beach calendar.
