American Muscle: How America’s most prestigious Concours d’Elegance is delighting collectors

If you’d like an example of how weird and wonderful the world of high-end car collecting is, I recently found myself witness to the unveiling of a bespoke Porsche 911. A mid-1990s 993 model, it had been customised in a unique Speedster body shape and painted ‘Otto Yellow’ at the behest of its commissioner, a wealthy designer of espresso machines.

Otto, it transpires, is the name of the Italian gentleman’s sausage dog, and as lucky new owner Luca Trazzi — the head of Porsche’s ultra-ultra-exclusive Sonderwunsch (special request) department — pulled the covers off the banana hued machine, the pampered pooch was brought on stage to a round of applause so he could give the sports car his seal of approval.

I’d jetted out to California’s Monterey Car Week in search of the world’s finest automobiles and obsessive car culture. The world’s most covetous car collectors are American. Tyre-fitted treasures from across Europe have, particularly in the last 30 years, steadily made their way across the Atlantic and Pacific to the US, perhaps more than any other antiquity.Monterey — familiar to TV viewers via Big Little Lies and bookworms from the prose of John Steinbeck — serves not only as a chance to witness automotive artworks you’re unlikely to see anywhere else, but also a half-billion-dollar salesroom for auction houses and a social event of serious one-upmanship. During Car Week — which is ten days, not seven — there are no fewer than 80 events staged across the Monterey peninsula, which is a challenge to navigate. 

In this respect, it’s less like Goodwood, the Le Mans Classic or Europe’s most prestigious car event, the Concorso d’Eleganza at Lake Como’s Villa d’Este (which are all held on one site) and more like a Fashion Week in which you find yourself and a couple of thousand other invitees moving from location to location, invariably stuck in traffic. In this case, that traffic can be worth a billion quid.ELEGANCE ON WHEELS

The stand-out events are the Tour d’Elegance, which is a 30-mile cavalcade of jaw-dropping machines driving from Pebble Beach down to Big Sur and back; the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, where racing cars from the 1950s and 60s take to the legendary Laguna Seca race track; The Quail, where for $2,000 a ticket guests can kick the tyres of rare cars old and new; and the grand finale, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, where different classes of automobile are judged and celebrated.

Mercedes-Benz and Bugatti cars have won the Concours’ coveted Best in Show award a record ten times, with Duesenberg (seven times), Rolls-Royce (five) and Packard (four) trailing in their exhaust fumes. Since the beginning of the competition, only seven post-war cars have won the trophy. Victorious owners have included sartorial icon Ralph Lauren and the late Formula One world champion Phil Hill, who was also a Concours judge for 40 years.

Mercedes took over a Pebble Beach villa and used the eve of the concours as an opportunity to premiere its first-ever Maybach SL; an uber-luxe version of its elegant and erstwhile convertible, and the only time in its 115-year history that the Maybach badge has been affixed to a two-seater. To mark the occasion, we were offered rides in a spectacularly vast and bellicose 1932 Maybach Zeppelin DS 8 — a three-tonne Teutonic titan.I visited The Quail, held at a Peninsula-owned golf course in Carmel. As well as very rare coach-built Ferraris, Delahayes, Talbot Lagos and Bugattis from the last century, there were also the latest hypercars on show; a red carbon-weave Pagani Utopia, the Pininfarina Battista B95 Gotham (one for Batman fans), the world premiere of the Lamborghini Temerario, and the Tuthill GT-One: a street-legal tribute to Porsche’s 1996 Le Mans racer that’s been reimagined in an Oxfordshire garage. In fact, The Quail was filled with Porsche restomods and reboots, signifying where the most lucrative trend in car customising is right now.

The biggest Porsche surprise was to be found at The Quail’s auction, courtesy of Bonhams, where a 928 that featured in the movie Risky Business went under the hammer for £860,000 — and that wasn’t enough to meet the reserve. In fact, bids across the board failed to meet the auction houses’ estimates, suggesting the bubble has burst for classics built in big numbers.This is not the case, though, with exotic rarities, and a finer showing than those at the Pebble Beach Concours you’ll fail to find. Since 1950, on all but seven occasions (and these were all in the early days of the competition when selection was different), Best in Show has always gone to a prewar car. That was the case again with this year’s big winner, a 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports owned by Swiss chemical heir Fritz Burkard, chosen from 214 entrants. What marks this factory race car apart from previous winners is this is a preservation car; unrestored, it wears its patina with pride and has been unmolested since King Leopold of Belgium had its livery applied.

In total, 25 different classes and 27 additional trophies were bestowed. The most unusual categories were for wedge-shaped concept cars and prototypes (UFO sightings in the area can be put down to these), with the early period first prize going to the iconic 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero Bertone Coupe and the ‘late’ period prize to the 1979 Aston Martin Bulldog. Both cars are owned by the Beverly Hills-based investor Phillip Sarofim.

I was more excited to see the lesser-known and even more experimental 1970 Ferrari 512 S Modulo Pininfarina Coupe — a Ferrari straight out of The Jetsons — and the 2016 United Nude Lo-Res car; which looks like a giant paperweight.Outside of competition, there was a large display of state Land Rovers and Range Rovers owned by Queen Elizabeth II. This represented the earthier end of the spectrum. It’s odd, I grant you, to find a sense of grounding in the late monarch’s possessions, but Monterey Car Week is overwhelming. The verdant fairways of a different golf club every day; the high ticket prices and VIP wristbands; the constant throb of Lamborghinis passing under your hotel room windows, the sense that to be a member of this club, you need to own a lot more than one Rolls Royce Ghost or a single Ferrari 250, you need the complete set. In comparison, Goodwood is a lot more egalitarian.

This is where new money comes to be laundered into old via a century’s worth of luxury automobiles, and where tech and finance bros rub shoulders with the Fords, Rockefellers and Waltons, shoring up the perimeter fences of the establishment in the process.

But, beyond the exorbitant sums of money, one does recognise the passion these owners, judges and enthusiasts have for the style and heritage of dynamic automobiles. Any of these cars would buy you a very, very, very nice house — but a house can’t do 200mph, can it?

pebblebeachconcours.net

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