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| Click to enlarge |  | | Attendees flock around the cars at the 1953 Concours as the Pacific paints a serene backdrop. | | | Click to enlarge |  | | Phil Hill (in the dark Jaguar XK120 in the background) ready to pass and take the lead in the first Pebble Beach Road Race, 1950. | | | advertisement | | | | Click to enlarge |  | | Today’s Concours is a grand celebration of style, ingenuity and engineering in motorcars of the past. | |
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"Just being asked to show at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance® is like winning any other concours."
This sentiment, expressed by a man whose treasured vintage car was rolled onto an expanse of Ireland-green lawn early on an August Sunday, is typical of most owners whose cars would join his, row on row, as night mist lingered on the shining water by the Lodge at Pebble Beach. Another, whose car had been judged Best of Show years before, likened the experience to winning the World Series and the Super Bowl at the same time.
No question, Pebble Beach after a half-century is the most prestigious of all concours d'elegance.
What Is a Concours d'Elegance?
Perhaps as old as mankind is that urge to show off what one prizes and compare it with what others prize. Organized comparisons of means of transport involving carriages and coaches, boats and barges have occurred through history.
When the 20th Century and the automobile were growing up together, such events were as showy as egrets. Fashion houses and carmakers collaborated to be judged the ultra of the ultra. Elegant women in elegant gowns gathered in elegant motorcars wherever the rich went to be rich together-Paris, the Riviera. Those declared winners reveled in the honor (and sold more cars, more gowns). The French called these festivals of excess "concours d'elegance" (contests of elegance).
The pomp was swallowed by the circumstance of World War II, but the concept did not die and now pops up wherever the population of car buffs is something over two.
A Site Worthy of its Stars
Pebble Beach as a setting is, in a word, glorious. Gnarled cypress pose in silhouette, rocks shred the Pacific into postcard sprays, fog threads through sentinel pines.
Where better for the stylish denizens of yesteryear to reflect each other in glossy coachwork accented with the occasional glint of nickel?
It is a sight stirring even to those to whom a car is simple transport. The righteous buff fights the compulsion to throw himself prone.
Pebble Beach did not spring full-blown into its present state of grace from a base urge to show and boast.
At first the Concours was a mere adjunct to another innate persuasion of mankind, which is to blow the doors off one's fellow drivers.
At mid-century a new breed was appearing in growing numbers-the sports car driver. This strain was given to remarking: "What a great place for a race!" whenever a turn preceded one and followed another.
A Road Race Is Born
The Del Monte Properties (the name change to Pebble Beach came later) was home to one of the world's most famous scenic roads: Seventeen Mile Drive. The upshot was a "European-style road race" on something less than two miles of the Drive. The first race was Nov. 5, 1950.
That first dash through the woods was won by a young man from Santa Monica, Phil Hill. Eleven years later as a Ferrari team driver he became the first American to win the world driving championship.
But before he joined the world scene he was to win other races at Pebble Beach, and in 1955 also take Best of Show in the Concours with his personally restored Pierce-Arrow.
The early Concours, organized by an energetic publicist for the properties and lodge named Gwenn Graham, was almost equally a show for new cars as for old-the latest from Detroit and abroad.
A Concours Defined . . .
But gradually the balance tipped and commercialism yielded to collectors and restorers, and the Concours turned toward today's persona being the celebration of style, ingenuity and engineering in motorcars of the past. But there was some rough terrain between.
If Gwenn Graham gave the concours backbone, Lucius Beebe gave it color. And he had a lot of color to give.
The erstwhile newspaper editor and author, full-time bon vivant known for traveling in his own railroad car, came aboard as chief Rolls-Royce judge and set a tone of relaxed decadence.
But by 1969, both Lucius Beebe and Gwenn Graham were dead. The Concours nearly foundered. It was still a social success (parties being self-perpetuating), but it was losing credence with the cognoscenti. Judging had become patchy at best and participation had fallen off.
And Redefined
Then Jules "J." Heumann and Lorin Tryon, both life-long car guys, took charge for 1972. As a team they possessed excellent organizational skills and the ability to ferret out superb cars and entice their owners to the lawns of Pebble.
The reshaping of the concours saw classes dropped and added-all directed to a tighter focus on style and elegance. The judging was tightened with experts in charge who respected and recognized authenticity. Standards were formalized. Elegance was more closely defined and distanced from willful flamboyance.
Also introduced were honorary judges, such as photographer Ansel Adams, who knew excellence in other fields and now brought that unique perspective to discerning elegance in automobiles.
The Heumann-Tryon team worked together to assemble each year not only the finest and most unique cars, but also the best examples of the annual "honored marque."
In 1985 they battled domestic and foreign bureaucracy to bring together for the only time the entire half dozen of Bugatti Royales ever made. Not even Ettore Bugatti had seen his fleet of giants in concert.
Pebble Beach as concours and as race split geographically after a fatality on the road course made evident that solid trees next to fast-moving race cars were not a good idea. A purpose-built course, Laguna Seca, was built some miles distant. In 1974 Steve Earle inaugurated the first of his successful Monterey Historic Automobile Races.
The early relationship of the two events is commemorated by the appearance at the Concours of the race winners Sunday afternoon. These cars drive over the famed ramp to cheers and applause, as do all the selected cars and winners of the Concours.
Reinventing Itself
The Concours, sensitive to the criticism that such events celebrate "dead cars," keeps fresh. One innovation, off-putting to rock-ribbed purists, was the introduction of hot rods to the sacred greensward.
People loved it. What Sandra Kasky, co-chair of the Concours, calls "boutique classes" have also enlivened the mix on the lawn.
Microcars were featured in 1997. "The Tour" was another addition to the program recognizing that engines are meant to run and wheels to roll-and not only over the ramp. Now on Thursdays preceding the Concours participation entrants take to the varied terrain of the Monterey Peninsula on a meandering parade.
A lunch stop in Carmel allows those without the price of entry to the Lodge grounds (now $150 and all for charity) to see the cars up close and natural.
A New Class
Another Concours addition is the Preservation Class for unrestored cars. It's one thing to piece together a car that arrives in unlabeled boxes, searching out or shaping missing parts, and watch it return to four wheels with smooth leather seats, bright metalwork and a depth of paint that could swallow the onlooker-arguably now far better than factory-fresh.
It's another to come across a car that happenstance and attention kept from the corrosion and erosion of use, weather and carelessness. Such a car wears time like a shawl around bony shoulders, like a trembling hand on a carved cane head. Such a car silences the clamor of the moment and inspires a contemplation of the time, space and lives it has known.
The Next Generation
With the 1999 death of Lorin Tryon and the retirement of J. Heumann, Pebble Beach has turned yet another page. Transition, well planned for, has been smooth.
J. Heumann is now Chairman Emeritus. Sandra Kasky Button is Chairman. Ed Gilbertson is Chief Judge. A panel of undisputable car nuts serves as guiding force.
Elegance is in good hands at Pebble Beach.
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