Monterey 2017 – Part 3
Words by Keith Bluemel
Friday during Monterey Car Week, apart from all the auctions and previews, there is The Quail, the 15th running of this exclusive event at the Quail Lodge Resort in Carmel Valley, for which the 5,000 available tickets are always an immediate sell-out. The show always attracts a great selection of classic cars, together with manufacturer displays, and included a Great Ferraris class in the company’s 70th Anniversary year. The winner of this was Chuck Wegner in his recently acquired 250 GT LWB California Spider, chassis # 1203 GT, a car well known on the UK concours scene in recent times when owned by Nigel & Sarah Allen, who picked up many awards with it. The overall Rolex Circle of Champions Best of Show award went to a very rare, and pristine, 1964 ATS 2500 GTS owned by Bruce Milner of California.
If you could draw yourself away from the track action at Laguna Seca, then Saturday was the day for Concorso Italiano at the Black Horse Golf Club, where there is always a wide ranging and impressive array of predominantly Italian machinery, running to over 800 cars and motorcycles, of which around 300 were Ferraris.
One of the guests at the show was the legendary Lamborghini test driver Valentino Balboni, who now has acts as a consultant for clients restoring their Lamborghinis, there are few better qualified than somebody who knew them so intimately. Apart from the Ferraris and Lamborghinis there were plenty of Alfa Romeos, De Tomasos, Fiats, Lancias etc, covering a broad age span and price range, quite literally something for everybody.
The grand finale to the manic week is always the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on the Sunday. This was the 67th running of the concours, and apart from the regular classes, some of the featured classes were for Isotta Fraschini, which actually had three classes, a general one, and two celebrating Castagna Coachwork, one open and one closed. Other special classes were for Open Wheel race cars, California Specials That Raced at Pebble Beach, and American Dream Cars of the 1960s, the latter featuring some wild custom creations.
The concours normally features two specific Ferrari classes, Competition and Grand Touring, whilst examples also frequently appear in more general classes, but this year in recognition of the company’s 70th anniversary celebrations there were two additional Ferrari classes. These were Ferrari Major Race Winners and Ferrari One-Off Specials, with a truly spectacular assembly of some of Maranello’s finest output.
As if this wasn’t enough, Ferrari North America had their own special display of 70 cars to celebrate the anniversary, on the First Fairway outside the main concours field, so it was total sensory overload for Ferrari enthusiasts. There just too many stunning examples to even begin to mention individual cars, for fear of missing something equally important or elegant. At the end of the day it was Bruce McCaw’s freshly restored 1929 Mercedes-Benz S Barker Tourer that emerged as the recipient of the prestigious 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Best of Show Award.
All Photos by Keith Bluemel
