It’s beautiful bedlam for the gearhead
Pebble Beach is a spectacular showcase of automotive royalty
In the pre-dawn cool, condensation makes a cape for a streamlined Fiat 8V Supersonic as it glitters under an arc light. This is the beginning of the end for Monterey Car Week, the opening movements of an annual symphony of high-dollar sheet metal.
Umpteen millions of dollars worth of cars stand ready to make their bow — but don’t get too caught up in the sky-high values. You wouldn’t consider the Louvre to be a bank, and neither should you here, where the pictures are moving. This is the peak of the automotive art world, and a throng of more than a hundred people have skipped breakfast, shucked off the covers and grabbed their cameras.
Dawn Patrol is just one of many traditions at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, and it’s perhaps the best one. Red baseball caps dot the crowd — a reward for only the earliest arrivals — a link of chain marks a corridor, and green-jacketed officials flit everywhere, some composed, others harried.
The line for coffee resembles the queue for the bathrooms at a Taylor Swift concert. A glazed donut goes down easy, as long as you can resist the urge to dust the crumbs off on your pants.
It’s too early for the fancy hats and silly pants of the afternoon crowd, although there is at least one gentleman in a suit that looks like it is made out of 1970s pillowcases. Then, the engines burst to life. There’s little rhyme or reason to the way the cars trickle out. A Ferrari 250LM follows an opentopped prewar cabriolet manned by a foursome dressed in period overalls and goggles. A sumptuous navy-blue Continental glides along in the wake of a flatulent turn-of-the-century rig with tiller steering. Jay Leno wanders past, joking with the crowd. Barry Meguiar, heir to an empire of car polish, pilots an early car through the crowd.
The stream of machines seems unending, and after 50 or so have passed, I move around to the back area where they’re lining up to drive around the blind corner. Calgarian Grant Kinzel’s Fiat is there, along with a bevy of eightfigure Italian machinery. When I walk back to join the crowd, the Dan Gurney/Brock Yates Cannonball Run Ferrari Daytona is just tiptoeing past.
What seems like a hundred golf carts are out there directing traffic, slotting the various entries into their assigned parking spaces. It’s got to be nerve-racking if you’re in one of the older cars, with jerky throttle inputs and indifferent brakes. It’s a miracle no one bumps into each other, although there is a stall or two.
“Push!” shouts one of the marshals, and an entire family of well-heeled folks tumble out in their finery to put their shoulders to the wheels.
High-dollar bedlam, but at least the day is still cool. As a sleek yacht twists at anchor in a patch of seaweed just off the coast, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any fog today.
No, today’s going to be hot as a griddle, baking the lawn and steaming people inside their suit jackets.
You hear the strangest things at Pebble Beach. I’m looking at the competition Ferraris, each one with a price tag sizable enough to build a mansion, each one a confection of alloy and red paint. They are astounding, thoroughbreds with impeccable breeding.
A plummy British accent wafts by. “Nothing down here,” it says, with double-cream Downton Abbey inflection, “is really floating my boat.” Ah, Pebble. There are those who come for the love of cars, and those who come for the spectacle. The hats for instance, which are akin to the umbrella-sized contraptions you find at Ascot Racecourse. The outfits have little to do with the event, unless you feel putting a pink hat on a poodle is somehow elegant, but it’s all about being seen and hobnobbing with the top nobs.
It’s a bit like being in the lower bowl of a major league hockey game, where a large percentage of people couldn’t tell you the score at any given moment. However, there is a game going on, and there are plenty of Pebble Beach attendees paying attention.
Over in a row of prewar classics, our own Nigel Matthews is standing in front of a sleek black machine, demanding to have the high beams and running lights demonstrated.
The owner seems a little flustered under the scrutiny: there are at least three judges poring over the details, cataloguing unseen faults, measuring the results against an encyclopedia of knowledge stretching back decades.
You won’t fool a judge at Pebble, always assuming you were lucky enough to be invited. Getting in is a mysterious process, as the select committee doesn’t tell you why they’ve rejected your application.
Once you’re here, entry is free and you’re treated like royalty, with invites to parties and all the rest.
Still, when the judges come around, the pencils scratch away, and they’re merciless.
Leaving the entrant to squirm under the microscope, I take a tour of a few rows, overwhelmed by the details. Zagato, Pininfarina, Figoni & Falaschi: on swooping, immaculately polished flanks are written the names of the best design houses in the world.
The backdrop of the Pacific is just a bonus: here, there’s so much to look at, your brain can’t take it all in.