The first Sunday of the month, a little after nine, cars start easing into the parking spaces along Chinquapin Road outside The Villager Deli. Nobody is holding a clipboard. There is no entry fee, no registration table, no wristband. A retired Porsche 911 owner might park next to somebody's daily-driver pickup, and both get the same nod from whoever walks up with a coffee to look. It runs until eleven, rain or shine, and then everyone drives home.
If you have lived in the Village long enough, you might remember when this same gathering used to happen a few blocks over, outside the old Roast Office on Cherokee Road. The meet moved. Nobody put out a press release about it. It just started happening at the deli instead, and the regulars followed.
What most people walking past on a Sunday morning do not realize is that this loose, no-pressure gathering and the much bigger, much more formal car weekend that closes Village streets every Memorial Day are the same operation. Both are run by the Sandhills Motoring Club. The Sunday meet is not a warm-up act for the big show. It is the same organization, the same volunteers, doing the quiet version of the same thing they do loudly once a year.
Nine to Eleven, No Clipboard Required
The club's own description of Cars & Coffee is about as low-key as local events get: the first Sunday of every month, nine to eleven in the morning, in the Village of Pinehurst, rain or shine. All makes and models are welcome. Parking is spread through the Village's designated areas rather than a dedicated lot, because the club does not own one. It relies on the same street parking everyone else uses to grab lunch downtown.
That informality is the point. There is no jury, no class structure, no trophy. A stock Miata and a restored Bronco get the same welcome. The people who show up are there for the conversation as much as the cars, which is a different kind of gathering than what happens on the Village Green every May.
The Same Club's Bigger Weekend
Once a year, the Sandhills Motoring Club puts on the Sandhills Motoring Expo, and the tone changes completely. It runs Memorial Day weekend, Friday through Sunday, and it is built in layers most residents only see one piece of.
Friday starts with an invitation-only Hagerty Cocktail Party, followed by a Block Party at the Pine Crest Inn that is open to entrants and sponsors, with a live band and a cookout. Saturday splits into a Road Rally through the Sandhills backroads, a separate Artisan Tour at Starworks in Star, about forty-five minutes from the Village, and an evening Hangar Soiree at the Moore County Airport, where dinner is catered by Elliotts on Linden and exotic cars share the tarmac with airplanes. Sunday is the Concours in the Village, the event most people actually associate with the name: judged classic and collector cars lined up along the historic streets, free for anyone to walk through and watch, no ticket required, with awards handed out that afternoon before an Awards Dinner that evening at the Pinehurst Fair Barn.
The scale shifts year to year. In 2024, sponsor Pinehurst Hyundai reported the Expo drawing 170 cars competing across 20 classes. In 2026, the Expo's own award announcement put the number at more than 130 judged automobiles representing over 40 manufacturers on the Sunday of Concours in the Village, held May 24. Different years, different fields, same street.
A Cobra That Had Already Been to Pebble Beach
What makes the Concours worth mentioning beyond a nice Sunday stroll is the caliber of cars that actually show up. The Expo's 2026 Best in Show winner in the Sporting category was a 1966 Shelby 427 Narrow Hip Cobra, chassis CSX-3131, one of only 32 built that year and one of just 10 known to still have its original body, engine, and drivetrain intact.
That same Cobra had been displayed at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance the previous August, placing fourth among six of the world's top Cobra 427 examples, and had most recently taken Best in Class at Hilton Head before it rolled onto the Village Green.
A car with that resume does not need to be in Pinehurst. It ended up parked on a street most residents drive down on the way to the post office, because the Sandhills Motoring Club has built an event serious collectors choose to enter.
Coffee Money Becomes Scholarship Money
The financial side ties the two events together in a way that is easy to miss if you only ever attend one or the other. Proceeds from the Expo go to the Sandhills Motoring Festival Endowment at Sandhills Community College, which funds scholarships for students in the college's Automotive Technologies Program. The free Sunday meet builds the community of people who show up, volunteer, and eventually pay to enter or sponsor the Memorial Day weekend. The ticketed weekend then turns that enthusiasm into tuition help for local students learning to work on cars for a living.
It is a small, self-contained loop. A monthly meet with no cost and no judges keeps the interest alive all year, and one weekend a year, that same interest gets channeled into something that outlasts the cars themselves.
What to Expect Depending on Which Sunday You Show Up
Most months, this is about as simple as local events get. Walk or drive to The Villager Deli on the first Sunday, arrive between nine and eleven, and look at whatever rolled in that morning. No registration, no cost, no dress code beyond whatever you'd wear to get coffee anyway.
Memorial Day weekend is different. Expect street closures in the Village for the Sunday Concours, though spectating remains free and open to anyone who wants to walk through. The other pieces of the weekend, the Friday Block Party, the Saturday Road Rally and Artisan Tour, the Hangar Soiree, generally require advance registration and tickets through the Expo's own site, since those events are built around entrants and sponsors rather than casual walk-ups.
Either way, the two events are proof that the Village's quieter routines and its biggest weekends often come from the same small group of people, doing the same thing at different volumes. The Sunday meet is not a lesser version of the Expo. It is the reason the Expo has anyone left to show up for it.
If you are settling into a home in the Village and still learning which Sunday habits are worth keeping, or you are weighing a move to Pinehurst and want a sense of what daily life here actually looks like beyond the golf course, Rose Ward with Fore Properties is happy to talk through it. Let's Connect.
