What is the Arizona Concours d’Elegance?
Every January, Scottsdale’s car culture runs at two volumes. The loud one is Barrett-Jackson: arena lights, a bidding frenzy, a quarter-million people at WestWorld. The quiet one is the Arizona Concours d’Elegance, one Sunday on the Scottsdale Civic Center lawns, where about 100 invited cars sit on the grass and get judged the way paintings get judged.
A concours is not a car show in the parking-lot sense. Entries are curated into classes — prewar coachbuilt classics, postwar sports cars, racing machines, and, for 2027, a first-ever class of pre-2005 Japanese cars — and scored by judges on authenticity, condition, and significance. The 2027 edition honors 80 years of Ferrari, which in Scottsdale means some of the most valuable objects on wheels will be parked next to the LOVE sculpture.
The show ran at the Arizona Biltmore from 2014 to 2017, folded, and came back in 2024 on the renovated Civic Center with Scottsdale Arts as a partner. It is now the connoisseur’s day of Car Week — and, at about $50 a ticket with kids under 12 free, the most civilized way to spend a Sunday in the middle of it.
How to do the concours right
Get the PLUS ticket if you care about photos. Concours PLUS (about $125) includes Saturday’s seminar series — historians, restorers, and marque experts talking for an afternoon — and Sunday’s Dawn Patrol, which puts you on the lawn as the cars arrive and before the public gates open. It is the only hour of Car Week that is genuinely calm.
Walk the classes in order, then go back. The field is arranged by class, and the placards tell the story: who built the body, who raced it, how many exist. Do the loop once for orientation, then return to the two or three cars you can’t stop thinking about. Judging happens mid-morning; awards run in the afternoon, and Best of Show is the reason to stay.
The Civic Center is the point. The lawns were regraded and re-lit in the 2023 renovation, and the white sculptural architecture of the civic complex is a genuinely beautiful backdrop — the cars look like they belong there. SMoCA borders the lawn if you want an art chaser, and Old Town’s restaurants are two flat blocks away.
Logistics: Old Town’s free public garages are the move; Drinkwater and Second Street fill last. Late January is 68 and sunny by noon, cold at Dawn Patrol — bring a layer you’ll shed. Buy before November 30 for the early-bird price.
The show that died and came back
The Arizona Concours was founded in 2014 by an all-volunteer board with an unusual beneficiary: Make-A-Wish Arizona, the founding chapter of the entire Make-A-Wish movement, which began in Phoenix in 1980. The venue was the Arizona Biltmore’s lawns, the judging was serious from the start, and over four editions the show raised around $300,000 for the charity while building a reputation as the Southwest’s most rigorous concours.
Then it stopped. In May 2017 the directors announced the event was ending; the January 2018 show was cancelled. The reason was the one that kills most good events — no sustaining corporate sponsor — with the Biltmore’s change of ownership as a complication. For six Januaries, Car Week had auctions and no concours.
The revival came from an unexpected direction. Scottsdale spent the early 2020s renovating the Civic Center into a proper event lawn, and Scottsdale Arts wanted signature programming for it. The concours returned on January 21, 2024 under the theme “The Art of Automotive Design,” framing the cars explicitly as sculpture on a civic art campus. It has grown each year since: 2025’s Best of Show pair (a 1929 Duesenberg Model J Phaeton and a 1957 Mercedes 300 SL Roadster), international judges, and recognition from the International Chief Judge Advisory Group that puts it on the same standards ladder as the famous coastal shows.
Why it matters to Car Week
Scottsdale’s January is the largest collector-car market week in the world, but for decades it was all commerce — auctions selling, dealers dealing. A concours changes the register. It celebrates cars for what they are rather than what they’ll bring, it puts them on grass in Old Town instead of in tents by the freeway, and it draws the collectors who fly in for the auctions out to a lawn where the public can stand a foot away from a Ferrari 250 without a paddle in hand. The Civic Center — built in the 1970s on the idea of culture as public infrastructure — is the right home for it. One Sunday a year, the city’s front room hosts the best cars in the world, and anyone with fifty dollars is invited.