Monterey Race Week – Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance – the Grail has been found!

We’ve been coming to this very special week on the Californian peninsula for maybe 10 years and exhibiting your brand there for as many.  It needs to be said – nothing comes even close to the Pebble Beach Concours, nothing. But before we get there:

First, there’s Automobilia Monterey – a laser-focused event organized for many years by Tony Singer from Vintage Auto Poster at the Embassy Suite hotel. It is a great show for Automobilia collector and certainly one we relish attending. The setting is perfect – large enough to cover the whole spectrum of our activities but not so big that people would love themselves during the visit. The audience is exceedingly friendly and knowledgeable and it makes it a real pleasure to showcase Suixtil at – even if that means missing some of the action going around. Talking of which…

Then there are the auctions – and this year was no exception, with the 3 big houses outdoing themselves with selections that were just unbelievable. We’ve always been particularly fond of RM Sotheby’s – might be the result of the fact that we have more friends there and that each specialist we speak to is both passionate and knowledgeable –  and their inventory of cars on offer this year was just incredible. Of course, you’d say, when you start with a 250 GTO – but it wasn’t “just” the GTO… That Aston proto, that Maser A6G/2000, that 550 Spyder… we could go on and on. We’re frankly quite surprised that such caliber cars would move at all, but then again, glad they do, given that it offers us a chance to ogle them at length and dream some quite luscious dreams….

Retro Auto is always a nice experience too, given that the setting is grand and that it has offered, especially since the launch of the Forum in the tent next door, many opportunities to meet great figures from the sport and tell them all about your brand (or, even better, listen to them telling it to us…).

And then it comes, the Sunday morning  and the Concours we have been waiting for all year. Morning might be a bit of a stretch, considering that we get up in the middle of the night to ensure we do not miss a beat from the dawn patrol.  It takes practice to get it right, but then again the payoffs are very satisfactory. Not every owner will want to speak with you as they are readying their beauties for inspections – but many do, maybe as a last-minute rehearsal of the explanations they’ll have to supply to judges known for their depth of knowledge and their profound love for cars. The early morning sunrise will shine just right on the field, the cars will be magnificent and the excitement of  attending such a rarefied event is palpable.

The specifics of this year’s edition of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance were, yet again, mind boggling – the “special classes”  eye-watering (what with, for example, a dedicated class for OSCA – you know, from the Maserati brothers!!!) and the show did not fail to deliver.  Mind-blowing Ferrari, exceptional pre-war beauties, stunning Tuckers (that we hadn’t seen in ages), amazing machines from the Raj and everything in between. The Concours, again, offered a show that has no rival and we were left wondering if we would be able to wait yet another year for the next edition. We have since been looking at ways to deal with the acute withdrawal symptoms that have afflicted us and will take any recommendation that might ease the longing.

Meanwhile, we invite you to go through the small gallery we put together for that week, hoping it will give you a glimpse of what we are describing – see if you resist – at life speed!