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To vie for the title of supreme party in Monterey County, the land of the Jazz Festival and Crosby Clambake, Pebble Beach Food & Wine and Cooking for Solutions, you've got to be rather fly. And this shindig from the sky, if anything, is precisely—nay, devoutly—that.

There are fine foods to beckon the belly (achiote prawns, braised short rib and rare ahi on thyme toast)...

...freshly launched automotive designs to sprain your neck (Aston Martin, Bentley, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lotus, Pagani, and Porsche)...

....wines to wow the palate (Bernardus, Roerderer and Schramsberg) and racing legends to pump up the pedigree (Jim Hall, Bobby Rahal, Carroll Shelby, Wayne Rainey, Jim Busby, Danny Sullivan, Dan Gurney).

It's the F-14s, military choppers and jets open for exploration, though, that lift this event to a different level of spectacle. It ain't easy for every local to afford, but it's harder to forget. And this is the 20th edition, so anticipate something(s) appropriately atmospheric.

A singular man is behind the singular party. I profiled Gordon McCall two years back for a cover piece on the evolution of the Revival event and his role in Car Week called "Ready To Jet: How Car Week Icon Gordon McCall Ups His RPMs." With prodigious help from his better half Molly, he puts on a hell of a party, and also toys with taking on a land speed record. Really. Read up.

While it now sprawls all over the Jet Center, the McCall mindblower once bottled up in his industrial mechanic's garage hunched around a hibachi and an ice chest. Two decades later the same protagonists percolate, plus several hundred world-class ballers.

There's a magnetic diversity of vehicles without wings, from the luxurious and cutting edge to the decorated and historic...

to the classic and muscular...

Tickets are $250 (with a chunk going to the CHP 11-99 Foundation and Naval Postgraduate School Foundation), so this would be the time to call in that favor Leon Panetta owes you, or the weekend to get your bikini car wash marathon on, www.mccallevents.com.

Check out next week’s Weekly for more on the way Car Week rolls, from the potato car at the upstart, irreverent and free Concours d’Lemons to the $300-a-ticket 18th fairway odyssey at Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance.