Every August, Monterey quietly turns into the busiest corner of the automotive world, and there is no better place to feel the week actually begin than at the Monterey Jet Center on the Wednesday evening. Motorlux, driven by Hagerty, is the event that officially opens Monterey Car Week, and the 2026 edition, held on August 12th, once again lived up to its reputation as one of the most exclusive tickets on the entire calendar.
Held between 6:00 pm and 10:00 pm on the runway of the Jet Center, the evening welcomed more than 4,000 guests, over 120 significant automobiles and 15 aircraft. The 2026 automotive field was organised into six themed classes: Le Pur Sang des Automobiles (a tribute to Bugatti and French racing heritage), The Coventry Collection (celebrating 65 years of the Jaguar E-Type), Dodici (Italian V-12s), Chasing Cherry Blossoms (pre-1996 Japanese classics), Privé One (bespoke and coachbuilt one-offs) and Rally Madness (with a heavy focus on Group B).
The real character of Motorlux, however, is not just in the metal on display. Each themed class was paired with a matching culinary experience: French wines beside the Bugattis, Japanese cuisine around the Cherry Blossoms class, Italian food orbiting the V-12s. Twenty-seven culinary partners and fifty-five beverage partners kept the tarmac supplied with everything from A5 Wagyu and caviar to Napa Valley wines and Champagne Billecart-Salmon poured under aircraft wings.
Music drifted across the runway as the California sun set behind the mountains, and by the time the tarmac lights came on, the whole airport had turned into one of the most stylish evenings on the international car calendar. That is, in the end, what makes Motorlux stand out. The setting is genuinely unique, the guest list is deliberately kept small, and the mix of prestigious supercars, hypercars, historic racers and coachbuilt one-offs sitting between vintage warbirds and modern private jets is quite unlike anything else during Car Week.
It is car culture, aviation, gastronomy and California summer, rolled into a single evening. The full atmosphere of a night like this is impossible to translate into words, so we will let the images take over from here. Our gallery from Motorlux 2026, captured across the tarmac between sundown and last call, accompanies this article.
Photos and Words by Yaron Esposito
