Summer Silence

Hi Friends! 

Memorial Day has long served as the unofficial starting line for the American summer. For most of the country, it signals the emergence of classic cars from winter hibernation, the smell of high-octane fuel at local fairgrounds and a calendar packed with weekend drive in style shows. This year however, there’s a little bit of quiet and it is noteworthy.

To understand our position a little bit and why this silence is so striking, one must understand our reverse calendar dynamic. In the Valley of the Sun, our "Summer" happens October through early May. While the rest of the country is digging out of snowbanks, Arizona is in the middle of auction season, concours events and one of the most active stretches anywhere on the collector car calendar. By the time Memorial Day hits, Arizona enthusiasts are often retreating to air-conditioned garages or heading north. That seasonal inversion creates a useful vantage point. From Arizona, the national summer season can be observed almost in reverse. I have to say too, this past winter in Arizona was outstanding. Shows were better than ever, attendance was high, car quality was outrageous and all in all the 2025-26 winter show season here was incredible. This is somewhat where my confusion is. Usually, just as the rest of the country is accelerating into their local show season in a manner that reflects what we just finished, but the traditional signs of momentum appear unusually muted.

In years past, the lead-up to June felt louder. Local calendars filled up early, regional shows built momentum and community events created a steady rhythm that was easy to spot even from a distance. Entering the summer of 2026, the pattern feels different. There is still plenty of visible energy around high-end, multi-day Car Weeks and prestigious concours events, but the presence of mid-tier, community-focused summer show seems to be receding.

The real question is whether this is a temporary lull or a structural shift. Is the traditional summertime car show actually fading or is it simply losing relevance within a market that now rewards exclusivity, specialization and destination-scale spectacle?

One possible explanation is the professionalization and privatization of the enthusiast experience. Private, membership-oriented gatherings and club-only events have become far more prominent. In the current landscape, many enthusiasts appear to prefer curated formats over broad public access. Rather than spending a Saturday in a hot parking lot with 500 unrelated vehicles, more collectors (and especially super car enthusiasts) are choosing organized drives with fixed routes and hospitality built in, private track experiences with limited-access circuit time, instruction and support or invite-only, smaller more controlled meets at private venues and spaces.

That shift changes the social function of the hobby. Traditional public shows were messy, but democratic and accessible. They mixed generations, budgets, tastes and levels of expertise. Private events are cleaner and often better organized, but they narrow the audience. The more the market moves toward closed environments, the less visible enthusiast culture becomes to the casual public.

Another factor is the sheer gravity of mega events. As regional weeks and marquee concours gatherings continue to grow, they consume a larger portion of an enthusiast's annual event budget, both in time and money. When someone spends a week attending high-stakes auctions, elite shows, and destination gatherings, the appetite for a local Saturday morning show in June may diminish. A winner-take-all dynamic starts to emerge. The biggest events get bigger, while smaller independent shows struggle to maintain attention, relevance, or consistency.

The metrics for success are shifting too. Increasingly, the conversation is moving away from raw headcount as the main measure of success. Across the industry and certainly as more corporate entities and luxury lifestyle components continue to dig their hooks into this hobby, there is a growing preference for attendee quality over total volume. Organizers and participants alike seem more interested in concentrated groups of serious buyers, collectors and committed hobbyists than in large numbers of casual spectators. That naturally favors smaller, more specialized events over broad public festivals. The tradeoff is obvious. A specialized event may be more efficient, more targeted and more commercially meaningful for the people inside it. But efficiency is not the same thing as cultural reach. Public shows help create new enthusiasts. Private events mostly serve existing ones.

The sad reality is, this may be the first step in a changing of the guard regarding car shows. I've warned for a long time in this newsletter that the oversaturation of cars and coffee style events would eventually be a push-out point and I do think we're starting to see that with the gallery style installation events that are popping up around the country. The looky-loo culture of the past, where families spent an afternoon wandering rows of cars they had no intention of buying, is being replaced by a more intentional and more segmented enthusiast culture. Digital media has also accelerated that change. Rare cars are now constantly visible on screens, which means physical events no longer hold a monopoly on discovery. That leaves public car shows in a more difficult position. If they are no longer the best place to see something rare, no longer the most efficient place to network and no longer the center of the annual calendar, then they need a new reason to exist.

What Are You Seeing? The art of the car show may not be dying, but its canvas is clearly changing. The silence of the summer season may be temporary. It may also be a signal that the market is reorganizing around exclusivity, destination events, and narrower definitions of value. From the Arizona reverse-calendar perspective, this change definitely feels less noticeable and it's definitely business as usual here (if not even busier and better), but as we approach the warmer months in other parts of the world, the question remains whether the hobby still wants to be public. Most of us are here because of the public nature that all of this has afforded us and the access that has provided for the last several decades. It would be a real shame to not pass that along down the line after us, so that those coming up behind can reap these benefits too.

That's it for this week…

Darin Roberge

(Learn More About Me Here)

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The more prepared and better educated enthusiasts are, the more success they have and the more enjoyment they tend to get out of this hobby. The bottom line is, the more you know, the better this industry is for everyone. Over the last several months, I’ve had more and more readers asking deeper questions about buying strategy, market trends, events, ownership experience and how to navigate the collector car world more confidently and successfully long term. Because of that, I’ve been quietly building several things behind the scenes.

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