Why they matter
Plenty of cities host a car show. Scottsdale hosts the one the rest of the hobby checks its prices against, and it started with two local collectors. Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson held their first auction in 1971, when Scottsdale was still more horse town than resort town. Half a century later, their sale is a nine-day, televised event at WestWorld and the anchor of the late-January stretch the whole Valley calls Car Week.
Their other legacy is economic. Car Week kicks off the city’s high season, handing off to the Arabian Horse Show and the Phoenix Open within a couple of weeks.
Where to find their mark today
Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale. The January auction at WestWorld, nine days of cars crossing the block, most at no reserve.
Arizona Car Week. The whole cluster of sales and shows that grew up around their dates.
The fall sale. Since 2024, a four-day October auction at the same arena, smaller and calmer.
Seeing it for yourself
The auction is built for spectators, and you never need to raise a paddle. Weekdays are for seeing cars up close with thinner crowds; Friday and Saturday nights are when the six- and seven-figure lots cross the block and the arena feels like a title fight. Bring a layer, because January nights at WestWorld are cold.
For the roots, go to the Scottsdale Civic Center, where the early auctions grew up on the grass. The judged Arizona Concours d’Elegance returned to those lawns in 2024, so the car scene has come back to where Barrett-Jackson started.
The full story
Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson were two Scottsdale car enthusiasts who met through a classified ad in the 1960s and started staging local car events together, among them a charity show that planted the seed. In 1971 they held the first Barrett-Jackson auction. Barrett’s taste ran to Mercedes and coachbuilt exotica, and the early consignments reflected it.
The auction grew up on the lawns of the Civic Center, then outgrew them. In 1989 it moved to WestWorld, the city’s equestrian and event grounds in north Scottsdale, the same year the Arabian Horse Show made the move. The acreage let it grow into a festival: well over a thousand cars, most at no reserve, live television and charity lots that have raised tens of millions of dollars.
Success brought competitors to the same dates, and the late-January cluster became Arizona Car Week. Some big sales made the legend: a GM Futurliner for more than $4 million in 2006, the original 1966 Batmobile for $4.62 million in 2013. Little is recorded here about the founders’ own lives beyond the auction, but the event they started is now one of Scottsdale’s defining spectacles. Its Scottsdale story spans the boomtown era to today.