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 one of Pebble Beach's most distinctive annual stretches: eight days of Car Week, followed by the event's close.

Car Week ended on August 17. The next few weeks bring a different event, built on an entirely different premise, and residents can enjoy it on its own terms.

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 community that hosted Car Week and has no similar event scheduled 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.
• Car Week's Best of Show recognizes a collector car. The PURE Insurance Championship pairs First Tee youth participants with PGA TOUR Champions players and amateurs.
• Car Week draws entries from 30 US states and 14 countries. The Championship's youth participants come through the Monterey Peninsula's First Tee chapter.
• Car Week reports auction results such as sell-through rate. The PURE Insurance Championship brings PGA TOUR Champions competition to Pebble Beach Golf Links.

A Different Kind of Event

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. The Concours also has its own charitable record, with cumulative giving passing $50 million.

Five weeks apart, Pebble Beach hosts an international collector-car showcase and a First Tee youth tournament on the same golf course. The PURE Insurance Championship is not a smaller version of Car Week; it has its own format and focus.

The One Thing That Never Left

Through the Concours, through the Tour d'Elegance reroute, through the auction totals and the fire evacuations happening near Big Sur, 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 follows the same route each evening.

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.

The PURE Insurance Championship offers a different format, centered on First Tee youth, while the Spanish Bay bagpiper's evening performance continues through both events.

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.