MECUM AUCTIONS, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, 2020
WHEN YOU THINK OF THE North Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, in the month of November, usually you think of SEMA — the annual orgy of automotive excess designed to introduce new products to the shop owners who sell them, and the journalists who will write about them. But SEMA was held virtually this year, and North Hall took on a very different, fairly austere look this past November when the Mecum auction rolled into town.
Both Mecum Auctionsand the state of Nevada were taking the notion of quarantine very seriously indeed. We’d say that there was little beyond what you saw on television, but this isn’t true: The event was one of the few Mecum car auctions that wasn’t televised on NBCSN and was held for the benefit of in-person and online bidding only. Only bidders, consigners, their guests, workers, and the occasional media straggler were on site; as was becoming the norm toward the end of 2020, these events were held without the presence of the general public.
A smattering of chairs and folding tables were arranged 6 feet apart needed a wristband to prove that they’d been temperature-tested at the entrance. There was no manufacturers midway of any sort here, and only the barest of refreshments. The cars themselves were in their own quarantine, at the opposite end of the hall and completely separate from the large (and largely empty) hall where the auction itself took place.
