Pebble Beach at 75: Ferrari, NART, and the Cars That Defined the World's Greatest Concours
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Quick Takeaways
- The 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance takes place on August 16, 2026, with Ferrari as the primary featured marque for the first time in decades.
- The focus is on Ferrari's overall Le Mans winners and NART competition cars — the machines that proved Ferrari's dominance on the world's most demanding stage.
- Carrozzeria Vignale is the featured coachbuilder, bringing some of the most sculptural postwar Italian bodywork ever created to the 18th fairway.
- Two of the cars at the center of this year's celebration live in the Concours Photo Art European Exotics and Racing Legends collections.
Seventy-Five Years on the 18th Fairway
The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance has been the standard-setter for the global concours world since 1950. It's the event that other events are measured against. And for its 75th edition, the organizers have chosen Ferrari as the primary featured marque, with a focus that goes deeper than a standard tribute. This year's celebration centers on the cars that carried Ferrari to overall victories at Le Mans and the North American Racing Team competition machines that brought those results to American collectors and American circuits.
What NART Actually Meant
Luigi Chinetti won Le Mans three times as a driver. When he became Ferrari's North American importer, he used that credibility to build something remarkable: a racing operation that competed under the American flag with Italian machinery, fielding cars at Sebring, Daytona, and Le Mans that carried the NART banner rather than the factory colors. The North American Racing Team wasn't just a competitive outfit. It was the bridge between Maranello and the American market that Ferrari now depends on.
The NART Spyder is the most famous product of that relationship. Chinetti commissioned ten open-top versions of the 275 GTB/4 against Enzo's wishes, sold them to American customers, and created one of the rarest and most valuable open Ferraris in existence. The 1967 Ferrari 275 GTS/4 NART Spyder in the Concours Photo Art collection is that car. It's the machine that a young Steve McQueen couldn't get his hands on because all ten were already spoken for.
The Racing Machines
Alongside the NART tribute, this year's Pebble Beach field will feature Ferrari's overall Le Mans winners. These aren't cars that participated in the race. They're cars that won it outright, ahead of everything else on the circuit over 24 hours. The 1965 Ferrari 365 P2 in the Concours Photo Art Racing Legends collection sits in that lineage. Only ten were built. They raced at Le Mans, Sebring, and the Nürburgring, and the development directions they established led directly to the factory machines that dominated endurance racing in 1966 and 1967.
When cars like these appear on the Pebble Beach field, they don't just compete for trophies. They anchor the entire event around the question that's always made Pebble Beach worth attending: what does it actually mean for a car to be great?
Vignale and the Art of the Coachbuilt Ferrari
Carrozzeria Vignale is this year's featured coachbuilder, and it's a choice that rewards anyone who pays attention to the Italian design tradition. Alfredo Vignale's atelier produced some of the most sculptural postwar Ferrari bodies ever created, working in the years before Pininfarina consolidated its relationship with Maranello. The Vignale Ferraris are looser, more expressive, and in some ways more daring than the cleaner designs that followed. Seeing a significant collection of them gathered on one field in August is the kind of opportunity that doesn't come around often.
Bottom Line
The 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance is a once-in-a-generation event. Ferrari as the featured marque, NART competition cars on the grass, Vignale as the featured coachbuilder, and 75 years of the world's most important concours all converging on one August morning in California. The cars that define this celebration are the same cars that define the Concours Photo Art collection.
The 1967 Ferrari 275 GTS/4 NART Spyder and the 1965 Ferrari 365 P2 are available as collector prints in our European Exotics and Racing Legends series.
