The Week After Car Week: What September Actually Looks Like in Pebble Beach

"Spanish Bay is so much like Scotland, you can almost hear the bagpipes." Tom Watson said that while surveying a stretch of restored dunes back in the 1980s, and by the time The Links at Spanish Bay opened on November 5, 1987, someone had made it literal. A bagpiper has walked that course every evening since, rain or shine, starting at the first tee in front of STICKS and finishing 45 minutes later at the fire pits by the second green. He or she has played through recessions, through wildfire smoke, and through the single strangest month Pebble Beach goes through every year: the one where a global auction economy shows up for eight days, then leaves.

That month just ended. What replaces it is not a quieter version of the same show. It is a genuinely different event, built on an entirely different premise, and residents who understand the difference get more out of the next few weeks than the ones still waiting for Car Week to wind down.

What Left Town on August 17

The 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance ran August 16, 2026, on the 18th fairway at The Lodge. Two hundred eighteen cars came through, including 33 international entries from 14 countries and 185 from 30 states. Best of Show went to a 1935 Duesenberg SSJ Special Speedster once owned by Clark Gable, one of only two ever built, shown by Harry Yeaggy of Cincinnati. The Concours crossed a threshold that weekend too, passing $50 million in cumulative charitable giving since it started keeping count.

The auction side of the week ran even bigger. Gooding Christie's, the Concours's official auction house for 22 years running, closed its highest-grossing sale in company history: over $159 million, a 94 percent sell-through rate, and a top lot, a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe, that sold for nearly $43 million and became the most valuable American car ever sold at auction.

None of that infrastructure stays. The bidder paddles, the international press credentials, the transport trucks lined up to ship cars back to Ohio or Switzerland or Thailand, all of it clears out within days. What's left is the same 17-Mile Drive, the same five golf courses, and a neighborhood that spent one week hosting the most concentrated collector-car wealth on earth and now has nothing scheduled that resembles it again until August 2027.

Even the Biggest Week Answers to the Coast

Car Week doesn't run on a closed track separate from the rest of the Peninsula, and this year proved it. The Pebble Beach Tour d'Elegance, the driving portion that traditionally traces the coast from Pebble Beach down toward Big Sur along stretches of 17-Mile Drive and Highway 1, was supposed to run its usual route on August 13. Organizers changed it with three days' notice. The Timber Fire was still growing near Big Sur, evacuations were underway, and Tour d'Elegance staff rerouted the entire event to stay within Pebble Beach and Monterey, coordinating with the California Highway Patrol, the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, and CAL FIRE to keep the roads clear for first responders.

It is a small detail in the scope of a $159 million auction week, but it says something true about this place: even the event built to showcase the coast has to answer to the coast when conditions demand it. The spectacle is real. It is not exempt from the terrain underneath it.

Two Golf Weeks That Aren't the Same Event

If you only glance at a calendar, September 18 through 20 looks like Car Week's smaller sibling. Another tee time, another set of roped fairways, another week where Pebble Beach Golf Links is booked around a tournament instead of open play. The PURE Insurance Championship runs those same three days this year, and on paper it shares a zip code and a golf course with the biggest collector-car week in the world.

The similarities stop there.

• Car Week's economy runs through Gooding Christie's and international collectors. The PURE Insurance Championship has no auction house at all.
• Best of Show honors a car nobody will ever drive again. The PURE Insurance Championship's marquee pairing puts kids on the course who are just learning to play.
• Car Week draws entries from 30 US states and 14 countries. The PURE Insurance Championship draws its most important participants from the Monterey Peninsula's own First Tee chapter.
• One week measures success in sell-through rate. The other measures it in mentorship hours.

The Event That Actually Belongs Here

The PURE Insurance Championship is a PGA TOUR Champions event, and 2026 marks its 23rd year as PURE Insurance Championship Impacting First Tee, a tournament that has paired First Tee youth participants with PGA TOUR Champions players and amateurs since 2004. This year also marks PURE Insurance's tenth year as title sponsor. Eighty PGA TOUR Champions legends will pair up with First Tee juniors to play Pebble Beach Golf Links, the same course that hosted last month's Concours crowd from a quarter mile away.

The tournament is staged by the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, the same nonprofit behind the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and the proceeds from both events support hundreds of nonprofits across California's Central Coast. There is no equivalent charitable structure at Car Week. Car Week's giving runs through the Concours itself, which is its own institution with its own $50 million milestone. The PURE Insurance Championship's entire reason for existing is the kids on the fairway, not the field of collectors.

That is the part worth sitting with. Pebble Beach hosts one week that is built to impress the rest of the world and one week that is built to invest in the kids who live three miles from the first tee. They happen five weeks apart on the same golf course, and it is easy to mistake one for a smaller version of the other. They are not the same kind of event at all.

The One Thing That Never Left

Through the Concours, through the Tour d'Elegance reroute, through the auction totals and the fire evacuations happening a county over, the Spanish Bay bagpiper kept walking the same 45-minute loop every evening. Two of the longest-running pipers, Mike Gillen and Missy Olson, have played there since the course opened, and Olson's rotation now includes her own children, Lane Olson and Charles Ables. Michel D'Avenas plays regularly too. The performance starts near STICKS on the first tee and ends at the fire pits by the second green, and the only thing that changes with the season is the clock: roughly 5:45 p.m. during Daylight Saving Time, a half hour before sunset once Standard Time takes over in November.

The bagpiper plays every day, rain or shine, whether the crowd at the fire pits is talking about a $43 million Cobra or a nine-year-old's first birdie.

That consistency is the actual texture of living here. The neighborhood absorbs an eight-figure auction economy for one week and a youth mentorship tournament for another, and the daily ritual that closes out both is the same person walking the same dunes at the same hour.

What September Actually Gives You

If you live here, the practical upside of this stretch is real. Fall is the season state tourism guidance points to for 17-Mile Drive specifically, since summer's marine layer can obscure the coastline for stretches at a time and fall tends to run clearer. The gate fee, still collected at any of the four entrances, gets reimbursed with a $35 purchase at Pebble Beach Resorts restaurants, which makes a stop at Roy's at Pebble Beach or Stillwater Bar & Grill an easy way to offset the toll on a weekday drive. Tee times loosen up once the Concours crowd clears, and the turnouts at Fanshell and Bird Rock stop competing with tour buses for parking.

None of that requires the PURE Insurance Championship to be smaller or quieter than Car Week to be worth paying attention to. It requires recognizing that it is a different kind of week entirely, one where the value on display is measured in a First Tee kid's swing instead of a auction paddle, and where the only performer who shows up for both is the one who never stopped.

If you are weighing what a place like this actually offers day to day, not just during the two weeks the world is watching, Ben Ottmar has spent years reading Pebble Beach at that resident level. Get in touch when you want a local read that goes past the golf tournament calendar.