The Company of Car People

A car rolls onto the block under the lights and the room changes temperature. People lean forward like they\u2019re at the rail of a ship. The auctioneer\u2019s patter starts low and climbs, paddles flick, numbers leap, and somewhere in the middle of it a sixty-year-old Corvette finds a new family. Nobody in that room is bored. That, I think, is the whole secret of the place, and the reason I\u2019m building a trip around it.

I didn\u2019t come to the collector-car world through the auction block. I came to it the way you come to most things that matter, through family. My father is a collector, and a serious one. His collection has grown over the past ten years to more than 120 cars. In my family, cars are a kind of love language. My dad and my brothers can talk BMWs for hours, Bimmers always, and I\u2019ve spent my whole life around it. So I know this particular kind of person well, and they are, almost without exception, the easiest company I know. They\u2019re also exactly who fills that room in Scottsdale every January.

If you\u2019ve never seen a great collector-car auction, picture a museum where everything is for sale, everyone has a story, and total strangers will happily talk to you for forty minutes about a car they love. It\u2019s the friendliest room going.

OriginsIt started as a fundraiser

The thing that became Barrett-Jackson, now billed as the world\u2019s greatest collector-car auction, didn\u2019t begin as a business at all. In 1967, two Scottsdale friends, Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson, staged a car show and parade with a charmingly grand name, the Fiesta de los Autos Elegantes. The point was philanthropy. The proceeds went to the town\u2019s art center and bought books for the local library. The cars were the lure. The community was the purpose. The two ran it for a few years before turning, almost on a dare, to the auction format.

That first Barrett-Jackson sale, in late 1971, was meant to be a one-off. They set it up near the old Safari Hotel with roughly seventy-five cars drawn largely from their own collections, and the headline lot, Barrett\u2019s Mercedes-Benz 770 Phaeton, carried a price that ran into six figures and pulled in collectors from far outside Arizona. The one-off never ended. Decades later, with Craig Jackson at the helm, the company leaned into a no-reserve format (the car sells to the highest bidder, full stop) and broadened its taste from pre-war classics to the muscle cars a younger crowd had grown up wanting. Today the philanthropy that started it all has run well past a hundred million dollars. The library, in other words, is still winning.

Cars have a way of bringing people together. McKeel Hagerty

The TribeA different breed of traveller

Here\u2019s a number that stopped me. Hagerty, the specialty insurer that grew into the cultural home of the hobby, reckons more than 67 million Americans describe themselves as car enthusiasts. Its chief executive, McKeel Hagerty, likes to say cars have a way of bringing people together, and everything I\u2019ve seen in my own family says he\u2019s right. Ask anyone in the hobby and they\u2019ll tell you the friendliest sentence at a Cars & Coffee morning is the same: tell me about it. Then you listen. The first restoration, the father who taught him to drive a manual, the car he chased for two years before he found it. The car is just the doorway. The person is the room.

That\u2019s what makes them singular company on a trip. Car people show up curious. They\u2019re generous with what they know and shameless about what they love, which turns out to be exactly the temperament you want at a long dinner table in a country you don\u2019t quite know yet. Put eight of them in a Tuscan piazza or on a Scottsdale terrace and you won\u2019t need to manufacture conversation. They arrive with it.

The FrameTravelling around a passion

There\u2019s a tidy name for what I do here, and it comes from the people who study tourism for a living. They call it special-interest tourism: travel organised not around a place but around a passion. Birders, divers, opera devotees, the wine and vineyard crowd, and yes, the car people. The destination matters, but the through-line is the shared obsession, and the trip becomes a kind of membership card. You\u2019re not a tourist passing through. You\u2019re an insider who happened to fly in.

It\u2019s a quietly powerful idea for how to spend a precious week of your life. A passion gives a trip its spine. It decides where you go and who you go with, and it solves the hardest problem in group travel, the business of turning strangers into a table, before anyone has unpacked. The auction is the headline, but the real itinerary is the company.

The PointBetter, together

I named this business Gatherwell because I believe the gathering is the thing. The right people, pointed at something they love, will make their own magic, and my job is mostly to clear the road. A collector-car week is the purest version of that I\u2019ve found. You come for the cars. You leave with the people. Come January, I\u2019d like a few of us to be in that room together.

Tell me about your car, and where you\u2019d like it to take you.