Why it matters
Every January the first thing that happens in Scottsdale is Barrett-Jackson: nine days at WestWorld, 2,000 cars, 300,000 or so people by the company’s count, live television, and every car sold to the last bidder because none has a reserve. The 2025 sale grossed more than $198 million. Other auction houses followed it to the same week and the result became Arizona Car Week; the Arabian Horse Show and the Phoenix Open pick up where it leaves off.
The company behind the event is a Scottsdale story in miniature. Two collectors put on a charity show in 1967 to raise money for the library. Their one-time auction in the winter of 1971–72 became annual. A mayor talked them back from Phoenix in 1989. A younger son who was never supposed to run it saved it in the 1990s with television and a rule that every car must sell. A Hollywood agency bought it in 2022, and another in 2025. It is still headquartered in the Airpark and still run by a Jackson.
Where to find it today
The January sale. Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale, WestWorld, 16601 North Pima Road, in the second half of January. Read the survival guide first.
The fall sale. The October auction at the same arena, added in 2024, a quarter the size and far easier to see.
Headquarters. 15555 North 79th Place in the Scottsdale Airpark, in the Princess and WestWorld corridor the auction helped make the city’s winter center of gravity.
The founders. Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson have their own page; this one is about the company.
How it started
Tom Barrett, son of a Chicago federal judge, arrived in Scottsdale in 1960 as a real estate broker who had been buying cars since his teens. Russ Jackson arrived the same year; he and his wife Nellie had pulled a 1934 Cadillac out of a junkyard in 1958 and were hooked. They met when Jackson answered Barrett’s ad for a 1933 Cadillac V16 Town Car, never agreed on a price, and agreed instead to put on a car show.
The Fiesta de los Autos Elegantes ran at Scottsdale Stadium in the fall of 1967 to raise money for the town’s library and arts facilities, with a second edition at the Scottsdale High football field in 1969: a booster town with a library to build, and a growing colony of winter residents with expensive cars. The pivot came in 1971. Barrett had about 80 cars and wanted fewer; Dean Kruse’s auction in Auburn, Indiana showed there was money in selling them in public; Phoenix dealer Leo Gephart and Kruse sat down with Barrett to plan an Arizona sale, and Jackson came in as partner. The two-day auction on a dirt lot beside the Safari Hotel offered 150 cars, 50 of them Barrett’s and 25 Jackson’s, drew about 3,000 people and sold roughly $600,000 worth, including a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz 770 Phaeton said to have carried Hitler for $153,000, three times the previous record. It was meant to happen once. It happened at the Safari every year through 1976, and by the mid-1970s Barrett and Jackson had split from Kruse to run Barrett-Jackson Classic Car Auction themselves.
The legal shape was a private family company, which it remained for 51 years. There were no patrons, no board and no charter, which meant that when the founders began to die, there was nothing to hold the thing together but a family.
The decisions that locked it in
Phoenix, then back (1977 and 1989). The sale outgrew the Safari and moved to Phoenix Municipal Stadium in 1977, where it ran four days and 800 cars and in 1987 sold its first million-dollar car, a Duesenberg. Herb Drinkwater, who had spent the decade landing the Princess and the TPC, wanted it back. In January 1989 the auction moved to the city’s HorseWorld grounds beside the TPC and the Phoenix Open, so the two events could feed each other. The first year drew a record 50,000 people and $29 million. The Arabian Horse Show arrived the same year, the grounds became WestWorld in 1990, and the city became a landlord that would spend three decades building to fit its tenant.
Television (1996–97). When Craig Jackson took over in 1995 he had attendance in the tens of thousands and a docket of prewar classics. He courted the new Speedvision network, which taped the 1996 sale and went live in 1997, the first collector car auction on television. The audience changed the cars: muscle cars, hot rods and customs joined the Duesenbergs. Attendance hit 100,000 in 1998 and 125,000 in 1999, and the coverage grew to 24 hours in 2005 and 40 the year after, through Speed, Fox Sports 1, Velocity and, since 2020, A+E’s FYI and History.
No reserve (2005). From the first sale the company had encouraged no-reserve consignments with lower fees; in 2005 it made the whole Scottsdale docket no-reserve. Every hammer is final, and the prices became the hobby’s benchmark, sometimes resentfully. Sales passed $100 million in 2006 and hit $108 million in 2007, a record that stood until 2014.
Selling the company (2022). Barrett-Jackson had added Palm Beach in 2003, Las Vegas in 2008, Mohegan Sun in 2016 and Houston in 2021, and was selling more than 3,600 cars a year. In August 2022 Jackson sold 55 percent to Endeavor’s IMG at a valuation of about $261 million and stayed as CEO, with Steve Davis, president since 1996, beside him. When Silver Lake took Endeavor private in 2025, the stake went to Ari Emanuel’s MARI, which completed the purchase on October 9, 2025. Two men’s garages are now a portfolio line beside the Miami Open and the Frieze art fairs.
The years it nearly ended
The near-death was dynastic. Russ Jackson died of colon cancer the day after the January 1993 auction, and his elder son Brian took over. Tom Barrett retired in 1994. In 1995 Brian died of the same disease, two months before the 25th anniversary sale, and his younger brother Craig, 36, inherited a business that had lost its founder, its co-founder and its heir within three years.
The second crisis followed. In March 1997 Craig and Nellie Jackson bought out Barrett and his son for $1.5 million. Two years later, with attendance at 125,000 and sales at $22 million, the Barretts sued, claiming Jackson had hidden what the business was worth, and sued their own lawyers for malpractice. Jackson said both sides’ attorneys had worked out the deal to take care of an elderly partner. Nothing came of the suit; Tom Barrett died in 2004. The name stayed, the Barretts did not.
The third was the recession after the 2007 record, which the company says it did not fully shake until 2018. The fourth was COVID: the fall 2020 Las Vegas sale moved to Scottsdale over local objections, and on December 10, 2020 the January 2021 flagship, meant to be the 50th anniversary, was pushed to the week of March 22. The anniversary waited a year.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1967 show existed to raise money for a library. The 1971 auction existed to sell Tom Barrett’s cars. Neither has anything to do with what the company is now, an “automotive lifestyle brand” selling 3,600 cars a year in four cities to a television audience: expansion ahead of any need the founders felt, driven by Craig Jackson’s reading of cable television and, since 2022, by owners whose other properties are tennis tournaments and art fairs.
Two things carried over. One is charity: cars for causes at nearly every auction, $6.2 million in January 2025 alone and more than $162 million since 1971, including the TGen cancer research fund Jackson started in 2010 after the disease that killed his father and brother. The other is Scottsdale. The city collected roughly $2 million in taxes and, in 2018, $694,003 in WestWorld rent and charges. The city’s side of the ledger, laid out by the Scottsdale Progress in 2019, includes a WestWorld operating deficit of $2.76 million in 2016–17, a $4.2 million North Hall expansion, a $1.5 million tent the company paid $100,000 a year to keep, and the bed-tax promotion.
Who the record leaves out
The record is Craig Jackson’s. The company’s histories, the trade press and the television all run through him, and the Barretts’ version of the 1997 buyout exists only in the summary of a lawsuit that went nowhere. Nellie Jackson, who co-owned the company for decades and whose Cadillac started the collection, appears mostly as a co-signer.
The sellers are the other silence. No reserve is a buyer’s rule and a broadcaster’s rule; the consignor whose car crossed the block at the wrong hour is not in the press releases. The 255 temporary workers at $15 an hour counted in the 2016 study, the WestWorld neighbors on Pima Road who absorb the traffic, and the Phoenix residents who lost the event in 1989 have no voice in the official story either.
What it didn’t have to become
The least inevitable thing about Barrett-Jackson is that it is a Scottsdale company at all. From 1977 to 1988 it was a Phoenix event, and Phoenix Municipal Stadium had held it comfortably for twelve years. Had Herb Drinkwater not made the call in 1988, the auction that became Car Week would have grown in Phoenix, WestWorld would have stayed a horse park, and the January economy the city takes for granted would belong to its neighbor. The alternative was the status quo.
The second contingency is the heir. Brian Jackson was the successor; Craig was the younger brother. The televised, no-reserve, four-city company is Craig Jackson’s invention, built after 1995 from a regional auction that had just lost its founders. A different survivor might have kept it a connoisseur’s sale of prewar classics, the kind the boutique houses still run across the Valley during Car Week, with a fraction of the crowd and none of the cameras.