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We all know what week it is. Everyone who is anyone in the car world seems to be in Monterey right now, apart from me. I have a fairly good excuse though, because we're getting very close to going live with something I've been working on for a long time, and disappearing for a week probably isn't the smartest move at this particular moment.

There will be no shortage of coverage from Car Week. Every major sale will be dissected, every big result will generate a headline and by the end of next week we'll have been told several times that the market is booming, collapsing, in a bubble, coming out of a bubble, or that one particular corner of it has suddenly changed forever. If you've been around this market for more than five minutes, you know how this goes. A handful of exceptional cars sell exceptionally well and suddenly they represent an entire market. A couple of headline cars miss their estimates and we're told the opposite. Reality is almost always considerably more complicated.

So we're not going to try and cover every Monterey sale this week. Plenty of people are already doing that very well. What I'm actually more interested in watching is what happens away from Monterey.

Online auctions don't stop because half the industry is standing around on the Peninsula. Cars are still ending every day across the major online platforms, sellers still need to sell and buyers are still bidding. The interesting question is whether Car Week has any measurable effect on that market. Does attention and money get sucked toward Monterey for a few days? Do online cars get less bidding activity because serious buyers are distracted? Does the enormous amount of press and social media around certain marques actually push more buyers toward similar cars online? And perhaps most interestingly, is there a knock on effect next week once buyers have spent several days watching cars trade for numbers they hadn't expected?

That's the part I'll be paying attention to. Not whether one Ferrari sells for $300,000 more than someone predicted, but whether we can see anything changing across hundreds of much more ordinary online auctions during and immediately after Car Week. Bid counts, sell through, pricing, activity by marque and even whether certain categories suddenly become hotter after everyone has spent a week looking at them. There may be absolutely nothing there, which is just as interesting. But if there is an effect, I'd rather see it in the data than declare it from one auction room.

Having said all of that, there is one Monterey car I can't completely ignore.

As regular readers will know, I have a weakness for wagons, and this 1979 Mercedes-Benz 280 TE at Gooding Christie's has me purring a little. The estimate is $130,000 to $160,000 and it's being offered without reserve, which is already fairly serious money for a W123 wagon, but this is about as far from an ordinary W123 as you can get.

It was bought new through factory delivery in 1979 and parked in a garage in Avellino, Italy. Then, in 1980, an earthquake and landslide effectively sealed the car inside the garage, where it remained until 2018. When catalogued it had covered fewer than 6,100 km and unlike the endless number of cars described as time capsules after receiving substantial restoration work, this one appears to have genuinely earned the description.

Then there's the specification. Nickel Green outside, Moss Green MB-Tex and Blue-Green cloth inside, the 2.8-liter six-cylinder gasoline engine, air conditioning, the rear-facing occasional seat and European bumpers and lights. Nickel Green disappeared after 1979, and Gooding describes the car as essentially entirely original, with Scott Grundfor Company maintaining it while deliberately preserving what was already there rather than restoring it.

And I can actually vouch for this one beyond the photographs. I went to see the car in person and it looks every bit as spectacular as the pictures suggest. Sometimes an auction photographer can make a very good car look extraordinary. This isn't one of those cases. The color, the interior, the condition and just how untouched the whole thing feels are even more impressive when you're standing next to it.

I'm usually wary when auction descriptions start using phrases like "likely the finest in existence," because auction catalogues aren't exactly known for underselling their merchandise. But having seen this one myself, I understand why they're willing to say it. With fewer than 4,000 miles, this history and this level of originality, it's difficult to think of many W123 long roofs that could credibly sit above it.

Would I pay $150,000 for a W123 wagon? That's a different conversation.

And once Car Week is finished, we'll come back to the question I'm much more interested in answering: did any of this actually change what happened online?