The Allocation — Issue No. 02

By now you've seen the figure. Monterey — the auction week that sets the tone for the entire collector year — closed at a record of roughly $755 million, according to Hagerty's tally. Up seventy-three percent over the same days a year ago. It cleared the previous record, set in the frenzy of 2022, by nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Almost every headline that followed reached for the same word: boom.

I want to spend this issue on why that word is doing a great deal of quiet lying.

Because a record total and a healthy market are not the same thing. And the space between the two is exactly what this letter exists to sort out.

Here is the part the headline leaves out. The number of cars that sold barely moved. The share of cars that found buyers barely moved. Volume was flat. Sell-through was flat.

So where did an extra quarter-billion dollars come from? Two places. The cars themselves got more expensive — and there was an unusually deep bench of seven- and eight-figure consignments, the kind of trophy cars a normal year simply doesn't see stacked one after another.

Strip the theater away and look at the median — the price of the car sitting in the middle of the pack. It rose about nineteen percent. That's the truer number. Not seventy-three. Nineteen. Buyers were willing to pay more this year. They were not willing to pay more for everything. They paid up, and they paid up selectively.

Which is the same word I kept coming back to last month. Selective.

Read the serious coverage rather than the press releases and one theme runs through all of it: the market has quietly split in two. There are the cars collectors genuinely wanted — and there is everything else.

At the top, the appetite was close to bottomless. A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe sold for $42.9 million, making it the most expensive American car ever sold at auction. A 1996 McLaren F1 GTR became the most valuable British car ever to cross a block. Ferrari took seven of the ten biggest sales of the week. And — mark this one — modern supercars accounted for more than half of everything sold.

In those same rooms, plenty of ordinary cars produced flat, forgettable results. The lower end of the market is thinning as those buyers get squeezed by a tightening economy. The wealthiest buyers have felt none of that. They are unbothered, and they are spending.

So the record is real. It simply isn't evidence of a rising tide. It's evidence of a widening gap.

The single most talked-about car at Monterey wasn't one of the records. It was a 2026 Ferrari Luce — an all-electric Ferrari, a design that had divided enthusiasts from the moment it was shown — that sold for $40 million. More than thirty-five times its estimate. The asterisk it deserves: it was a charity lot, which is its own peculiar economy and not a market signal.

But sit with this picture for a second. In the same week that a room full of serious people paid unprecedented sums for the last great naturally aspirated cars — the analog machines I wrote about last month — the piece everyone couldn't stop discussing was a battery-powered Ferrari.

That isn't a contradiction. It's the entire story compressed into a single week. The electric car is the future the industry is being marched toward. The naturally aspirated cars are the past it's being marched away from. And the market is pricing the second group up precisely because it can already see the first group coming.

Which brings me to the thing I said last month I'd be watching.

The reason these cars are finite is not sentiment. It's law. And the law just moved.

The European Union's ban on new combustion cars in 2035 is now set to include a carve-out for vehicles that run on carbon-neutral synthetic fuel — a new category that would, in effect, let certain new combustion engines be built and sold past the deadline. At the same time, tightening emissions standards keep making combustion engines more expensive and more complicated to produce at all.

Follow that thread to its end, because it matters to anyone holding these cars. The whole scarcity thesis — the reason a naturally aspirated V12 is worth a little more each month — rests on the assumption that the engine is being discontinued for good. Anything that softens that assumption, even a narrow enthusiast carve-out for synthetic fuel, is worth watching closely. It doesn't change today's market. It is a variable in tomorrow's.

I'm not predicting where it lands. I'm telling you where I have my eye.

A few observations from inside the current market, for whatever they are worth to you:

The headline results are only the visible tip. For every trophy car that sold under the lights at Monterey, there are quieter transactions happening privately — between people who already know exactly what they're holding and exactly who they'd sell it to. The public record tells you where the market's ceiling is. It doesn't tell you what is actually changing hands.

The divergence on the block is the same divergence I see off it. Two cars that look identical on paper are further apart in the market's eyes than they have ever been. The right specification, the honest mileage, the clean and short ownership history — those aren't details anymore. They're most of the value.

And a caution, because it's the season for it: a record week has a way of making everyone feel like a seller. Some cars have genuinely earned their new numbers. Others are riding a headline. Knowing the difference before you act is the whole game.

Away from the market this month, my son Blake opened his hockey season with a Labor Day tournament up in Dallas — and was named captain of his 14U AA team. He's thirteen. Watching him grow into that kind of responsibility has been the best thing on my calendar this year, and we could not be prouder of him.

The progress of that synthetic-fuel carve-out, and whether other markets follow Europe's lead — because the regulatory picture is the one thing that could genuinely bend this trend. And closer to the cars themselves: whether the front-engined V12 grand tourers keep pace with the mid-engined ones now that Monterey has reset the ceiling on both.

Until then — if you were at Monterey, or you're sitting on a car that a record week has you rethinking, reply and tell me. Some of the best reads I get on where this is heading come from the people reading this.

— Brian

Brian Adelsman has spent twenty-five years in luxury and exotic automotive sales — Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini, McLaren, Aston Martin — and runs an independent concierge brokerage built entirely on repeat and referral clients. He is the author of The Psychology of Exotic Car Sales.

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