You know it's easy to get down on rich folk. What with their fancy houses, fancy clothes with all those buttons, and usin' fancy wordin' that form perfect sentences! But'cha gotta hand it to 'em, 'cause they shore dew know howda throw a car shindig!
There are three consecutive days each August in the middle of the California coast where the automotive elite gathers, and we don't mean the car owners. The Concorso Italiano, Monterey Historic Races, and the Pebble Beach Concours d' Elegance arrive annually with all of the proper credentials, and justly so.
The Pebble Beach show, now in its 54th year, was once based around a road course event where legends such as Phil Hill got their start in auto racing. The car show portion took over the festivities in the late '50s when the racing portion was retired, and the event really took off in the extravagant '80s and '90s.
The Monterey Historics, or more accurately the Rolex Monterey Historic Automobile Races, were started in 1974 at the nearby Laguna Seca racetrack as a way to reintroduce vintage car racing to a whole new breed of car enthusiasts. Once a one-day show that drew 60 cars, it now brings more than 400 vehicles. The Concorso Italiano began as a way for purists who believe that only the Italians can produce fine-looking performance automobiles to get together, as well as trade pasta recipes.
The fact all three automotive events overlap each other in one way or another during one long weekend makes for a serious case of sensory overload. The events are pricey to attend ($100 alone for a walk-in entry ticket for the Pebble Beach show, but the money does go to charity), and even crummy $60 hotel rooms magically increase that weekend in value to the tune of $180 per night, but it is a safe guarantee that you will never find another collection of the most beautiful, rare, awesome, and expensive cars anywhere else on the planet. Take for example the Ferrari GTO class at the Monterey Historics; If you can find an early '60s GTO for sale, expect to pay in the $5 to $7 million range for it. There were 17 GTOs racing each other in one class at the races on Saturday, which represents almost half of the known production number of those cars.
Want to see the latest supercars and prototypes from around the globe? The Concorso boasted two debuts to the automotive world: The unveiling of the Shelby GR-1 coupe from Ford (really an updated Daytona coupe in new millennium clothes to bookend the new Cobra roadster that was parked next to it) as well as the new Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster (just what we need, another car with less roof and more money!). Even the folks at Chrysler got into the act, showcasing their new high-end prototype, the ME Four-Twelve at the Races. But the Concorso was big this year in another way, too, as 550 of the 1,700 cars entered in this year's show were Ferraris, possibly a world record for attendance by that marque.
And yet sprinkled between the champagne flutes and racing Alfas were a collection of kits and replicars. Though the Pebble Beach show didn't include kits, there were plenty of rare examples of automotive design to draw from if you were looking for something different to build in your own garage. We even found a few kit manufacturers set up at these shows, each selling the crowd on the virtues of owning a replicar at a fraction of the original's cost. The kicker? It worked! Each company we talked to ended up selling cars and moving product.
For anybody who considers themself a car nut, you can't go wrong spending a long week in and around Monterey in August. Half of the fun is discovering a car you've never heard of just around the next corner, another half is the fun in seeing them perform as they were meant to, with straight pipes blatting out their exhaust notes and gas pedals mashed to the floorboards, while the last half is the satisfaction that what you're apart of will never be duplicated again. Wait a minute, that's three halves! Exactly-it's just too much fun!