Page 11 - Experience Magazine Winter 2023

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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