For four decades, the words “Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance” have been inseparable from the name Sandra Button. As she steps back from the chairmanship in October, it is worth pausing to consider just how much of what the world now recognizes as the pinnacle of automotive celebration bears her fingerprints.
Button joined the Concours in 1991 as its director of special events, at a moment when the show, though respected, was still a regional gathering wrestling with financial uncertainty and roughly 8,000 attendees. She became Executive Director not long after, and by 2002 had ascended to Chairman — a role she would hold with quiet, relentless conviction for more than twenty years. Under her stewardship, weekly attendance climbed to an estimated 47,000, and the single Sunday showcase on the 18th fairway blossomed into a full week of automotive culture: the Pebble Beach Motoring Classic, a 1,500-mile rally; the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance presented by Rolex; the Concept Lawn, where manufacturers unveil the future of the automobile; and a rich calendar of Classic Car Forums that turned the event into as much a conversation as a competition.
Numbers alone do not capture what Button built. She widened the very definition of what belongs at a concours, expanding eligibility to include electric vehicles, postwar GTs, and hot rods, and she made a deliberate effort to bring younger judges and selectors into a world long defined by tradition. She forged and sustained partnerships — with Rolex for more than twenty-five years, with Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, and Infiniti, and with Gooding Christie’s as the event’s official auction house since 2004 — that gave the Concours both financial footing and global reach. Perhaps most meaningfully, she turned the event into a philanthropic engine, growing charitable contributions to more than $45 million over her tenure, with $4 million distributed in 2025 alone.
During her tenure, female-owned car collections — including those of Anne Brockington Lee and Jane Weitzmann, not to mention celebrity collectors like Kate Moss, Kylie Jenner, Lady Gaga, and Sydney Sweeney — have gained worldwide prominence through a number of Best-in-Class appearances. The list of Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Best in Show winners includes entries either owned or co-owned by women.
Button’s credibility never came from the sidelines. A collector herself, she and her husband Martin have assembled a fleet spanning a 1904 Oldsmobile to a 1972 Ferrari 365 GTC/4, and she has logged real miles in events like the Copperstate 1000, the 1000 Millas Sport Argentina, and the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run.
“I love everything about those cars,” she has said, and it shows in how she speaks about the hobby: not as spectacle, but as a language that “speaks to people across all backgrounds and in all parts of the world.” Asked her greatest strength, she gave a characteristically unglamorous answer. “I feel a lot of passion and purpose … and I’m fiercely persistent.”
That persistence has been recognized formally, too. In 2024, America’s Automotive Trust presented Button with the Nicola Bulgari Award for her contributions to preserving automotive heritage, and under her leadership Pebble Beach was named Motoring Event of the Year at the International Historic Motoring Awards in London.
As Vince Finaldi takes the wheel as the Concours’s new president, with Button remaining involved as brand ambassador and strategic advisor through 2028, the transition is being handled with the same care she brought to everything else. In her own words, “it is time for the next generation of car lovers to come to the fore.” But the road she paved — from a modest gathering on a foggy fairway to the undisputed capital of the collector-car world — will carry her name for a long time to come.
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