What it means
Say Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale and nobody thinks of two men. They think of a week in late January when WestWorld fills with tents the size of airplane hangars, when the Loop 101 off-ramps at Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard back up by nine in the morning, when every hotel from the Airpark to Old Town is sold out and a muscle car with a seven-figure hammer price is on television in the bar. The company is a collector-car auction house with sales in several cities; the word, locally, is the Scottsdale event and everything it drags along behind it.
That trailing cloud has its own name, Arizona Car Week, or just Car Week: the other auctions (Bonhams, RM Sotheby’s, the revived Arizona Concours d’Elegance), the cars-and-coffee mornings, the hotel-lawn consignments and the dealer parties that pile onto the same dates. The site’s guide to the company is Barrett-Jackson; the annual sale is covered at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale; the umbrella and every satellite is decoded at Arizona Car Week.
Where you’ll meet it
Mid to late January, at WestWorld and across the Airpark; in hotel rate calendars, where it marks the start of high season; on the Discovery-family broadcasts; and in traffic reports, where “Barrett-Jackson” is a complete explanation.
Where the word came from
The name is two surnames, and the partnership began with a classified ad. Tom Barrett, from Illinois, and Russ Jackson, from Michigan, each moved to Scottsdale in 1960. Barrett advertised a Cadillac V-16 for sale; Jackson answered the ad, did not buy the car, and became a friend. In 1967 the two staged the Fiesta de los Autos Elegantes, a car show at Scottsdale Stadium that raised money for the town’s library and arts facilities, and that charity show is the real root of what followed. The site profiles both men at Barrett and Jackson.
The auction came in 1971. Barrett wanted to thin a collection of about 80 cars; a visit to the Kruse family’s auction in Auburn, Indiana, that summer showed him how. The first Barrett-Jackson auction, in Scottsdale that December by most accounts, had the Kruses at the podium, 50 of Barrett’s cars, 25 of Jackson’s and 75 consigned by others. It was meant to happen once. About 3,000 people came, and the partners did it again the next winter, on a dirt lot beside the Safari Hotel on Scottsdale Road, and every winter after. They parted with Kruse in the mid-1970s, and Jackson’s family, led by his son Craig Jackson, has run the company since.
The word became an event in 1989. The sale had moved to Phoenix Municipal Stadium; Mayor Herb Drinkwater wanted it back and offered HorseWorld, the city’s new equestrian center in the empty desert beside the TPC course. The first WestWorld-site auction drew a record 50,000 people and $29 million in sales, HorseWorld was renamed WestWorld in 1990, and the city has built around the event ever since.
“Car Week” is the youngest term. Other auction houses began arriving in the 1990s and 2000s to sell to the crowd Barrett-Jackson had assembled; by the mid-2010s the cluster needed an umbrella, and “Arizona Car Week” is what the trade press and the tourism offices settled on. No one coined it on the record.
What it is not
Barrett-Jackson is not a car show, though it looks like one; the cars are for sale, most of them at no reserve. Car Week is not a single organization or ticket; each auction is a separate company with its own admission. And Barrett-Jackson is not in Phoenix, whatever the national broadcasts say.
The fine print
The dates are slightly contested. Wikipedia and most retellings put the first auction in December 1971; the Encyclopedia of Company Histories and the company’s own fiftieth-anniversary coverage say January 1972. The company dates itself to 1971, and the site’s organization guide follows it while noting the disagreement. The 1967 Fiesta is firmly dated and firmly placed at Scottsdale Stadium; the early auctions are usually placed on the Safari Hotel lot, though one company account puts them on the Civic Center lawns.
The scale is the point of the week. The Scottsdale sale runs more than a thousand lots, draws crowds in the hundreds of thousands over its run and sells well over $100 million in most years, with a handful of charity lots that go for millions and get the television time. The event has grown from a weekend to a week and, by the company’s announcement, to nine days in 2027. For Scottsdale that means bed tax, restaurant receipts and the first sellout of the winter season, two weeks before the Phoenix Open does it again a few hundred yards away.
For the visitor it means two practical facts. The company sells admission, parking and bidder registration separately, and the auction survival guide walks through all three. And the best viewing is on the weekdays, when the tents are open, the docket is deep and the people wandering the rows are the ones who will own the cars by Saturday.