Page 11 - Experience Magazine Winter 2023
P. 11

From left to right: The auction site at Phoenix
                                                                                 Municipal Stadium in the late 1970s; Craig, a
                                                                                 Guinness World Records representative, Operations
                                                                                 Director Casey McDonald and I celebrating the
                                                                                 moment on the 2014 Scottsdale Auction block
                                                                                 when the auction site at WestWorld set a new record
                                                                                 for size; The 2020 Scottsdale Auction site.












































           around, and evolved from, Scottsdale. Many of the     As we evolve as a society and as the car culture matures
           friends we see every year followed the same path.     and grows, and as the cars of today become the collector
                                                                 cars of tomorrow, it’s just this incredible place to
           An enormous amount of work goes into making
           Scottsdale happen. We have a crew that works          showcase that heritage and capture that passion and
           incredibly hard. When people come to Barrett-Jackson,   share it with like-minded people in one of the most
           everything is turnkey, but long before Thanksgiving   beautiful places in the world as far as I’m concerned:
           we’ve already started preparing those tents, and they   Scottsdale, Arizona, Barrett-Jackson.
           start breaking ground in mid-December. Once we        For me, the memories that stem from this event are life
           get the site built, we have our IT team in there to get   memories, and I think that’s true for a lot of the people
           our technology together and establish the “command    who show up at Scottsdale. There are countless people
           center,” then we have to lay out the site for the cars.   who have received a marriage proposal at the event or
           The location of each sign and every display is part   relived the warm memories of their first car, or bought
           of an extremely well-thought-out plan. You have fire   the car of their dreams, or met someone and made a
           department safety regulations to comply with. It’s a   lifelong friend. So many of those unions take place at
           huge undertaking. Pretty much what we do is build a   Barrett-Jackson.
           city, and we populate it with hundreds of thousands of   We bill ourselves as The World’s Greatest Collector Car
           people over the period of a week with infrastructure to   Auctions for a reason, and it all starts in Scottsdale.
           keep that city humming along.
                                                                 —  STEVE DAVIS


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