What was Gooding’s Scottsdale auction?
For thirteen Januaries, the most elegant room in Arizona Car Week was a tent in a mall parking lot. Gooding & Company — the Santa Monica house that runs the official Pebble Beach auction — arrived in Scottsdale in 2008 and set up beside Scottsdale Fashion Square, where it sold the highest average-priced cars of the week to a crowd that had flown in specifically to buy them.
The docket was the point: Ferraris from the 1950s and ’60s, prewar Mercedes and Hispano-Suizas, Duesenbergs, Porsches with racing histories. In 2019 the sale brought $48.2 million and a 1963 Ferrari 250 GT SWB Berlinetta at $7.6 million — the most expensive car sold anywhere in Arizona that week. Then came 2020: a normal sale in January, a pandemic in March, two online-only “Scottsdale Editions,” and silence. Christie’s bought the company in 2024, and Gooding Christie’s calendar no longer includes the desert.
It belongs in this guide for the same reason Russo and Steele does: Car Week looks permanent from the outside, and it isn’t.
The tent beside the Nordstrom
The choice of venue was inspired and slightly absurd. Fashion Square is the geographic center of Scottsdale’s resort belt — the Phoenician, the Valley Ho, the Old Town hotels are all minutes away — and its north lots had room for a marquee, a preview hall, and valet for people who arrive in cars worth more than the tent. So each January a white structure went up beside the mall, and for a week shoppers could walk from the food court to a preview of a Bugatti Type 57.
Inside, Gooding ran the format it perfected at Pebble Beach: a two-day sale, Friday and Saturday at 11 a.m., with a public preview from Wednesday. Admission in the early years was about $30 and included the auction; catalogues sold separately and became collectibles in their own right. The auctioneer was Charlie Ross, the British ringmaster whose patter is half the Gooding experience, and the room was small enough that you could see every bidder.
The specialty was consistent. Where Barrett-Jackson moved volume and Russo moved muscle, Gooding moved provenance — cars with racing histories, coachbuilt bodies, and documentation folders thicker than the catalogue. Its $43 million (2016) and $48 million (2019) totals came from a few dozen extraordinary lots rather than hundreds of ordinary ones.
How it ended
The final live sale, January 17–18, 2020, was a good one: $35.9 million, an 89% sell-through, a 1995 Ferrari F50 at $3.2 million as the week’s top lot, and a 1932 Hispano-Suiza J12 that set an auction record. Nobody in the tent knew it was the last time.
When the pandemic closed the 2021 calendar, Gooding pivoted to “Geared Online: Scottsdale Edition” — a virtual sale timed to Car Week, run twice. It worked well enough as commerce and not at all as an event; the entire appeal had been the tent, the preview, the crowd of people who could tell a 250 GT SWB from a Lusso at forty feet. By 2023 the house had quietly let the Arizona date go, concentrating on Pebble Beach, Amelia Island, and its European expansion.
Then, in September 2024, Christie’s — which had exited car auctions in 2007 — announced it was acquiring Gooding & Company outright. The renamed Gooding Christie’s kept David Gooding as president and kept the coastal sales; it added Paris and New York. Scottsdale, which had been a thirteen-year fixture, simply wasn’t on the list.
What it left behind
Car Week absorbed the loss the way it absorbs everything. Bonhams at the Westin Kierland inherited the boutique-in-a-resort lane; RM Sotheby’s at the Biltmore kept the seven-figure Ferraris; and the revived Arizona Concours on the Civic Center lawn gave the same collectors a reason to gather in Old Town without a gavel. But the specific pleasure of Gooding — walking out of a department store and into a room where Charlie Ross was selling a Duesenberg — is gone. Fashion Square’s north lot is a parking lot again, and locals who were there tend to mention it unprompted every January.