Postcard from Monterey Car Week

On the car front, it made you realise what a debt of thanks this particular niche within a niche of the car industry continues to owe to the Porsche 911. Once you’d cruised past the stands of Ruf, Gemballa, Kalmar, Tuthill, Gunther Werks and Singer, you soon realised that without the 911, half of the show simply wouldn’t be there. Even Porsche was at it, its ‘Sonderwusch’ (Special Request) department revealing a gorgeous one-off 993 Speedster in ‘Otto Yellow’ paint.

This bespoke hue was named after the owner’s dog who duly graced us with his presence on stage and who I couldn’t help noticing had not one yellow strand of hair on his defiantly black and white coat. But by then I had long ceased to be remotely surprised by anything happening around here. Pedants will point out that this is not quite the first 993 Speedster built, but it is so far removed from the handful of others in both time and specification that it can be considered unique.

But actually of all those playing the 911 game for all they were worth on the Quail lawn, it was Richard Tuthill’s gorgeous GT One that stole the whole damn show. He’s going to build just 22 cars, all done completely in house, each priced at £1.5m, half of which were sold before the car was even unveiled, the other half pretty much as quickly as the company could write down the orders. Later that day I met a glum-faced collector who told me he’d arrived a fraction too late and left the Quail without one.

Other highlights included a rolling chassis of a Bugatti Tourbillon – if you ever wondered why they cost so much, one look at the carbon fibre masterpiece carrying its naturally aspirated V16 engine would provide the answer – the newly launched 907bhp V8, twin-turbo hybrid Lamborghini Temerario replacement for the Huracan, a display of supercars from what I think of as ‘my’ era, including Ferraris F40 and F50, a couple of EB110 GT Bugattis, an XJ220, a Diablo SE 30 and so on, plus a fabulous assortment of the best Group B rally cars from the Peugeot 205 T16 and Lancia Delta S4 to a couple of 037s and a Metro 6R4.

But every time I thought a car had my undivided attention, someone would walk into view looking like an extra from a filmic mashup of The Great Gatsby and Mad Max Beyond The Thunderdome and my train of thought would be broken once more. Where did these people come from? Where are they going? What did they look like when they woke up this morning? All questions for which there could be no answer.

Wandering around Monterey, you simply stop noticing the cars. On one 200-yard walk from our hotel to a local restaurant, I found two Porsche Carrera GTs and one 918 Spyder just parked up at the kerbside. It was, in all senses, just too much. My mind became sated, much like your stomach might if force fed foie gras for a day. I found myself in urgent need of a palate cleanser. And, the very next day, I found one.

Day Two: Concours D’Lemons, Saturday 17 August

In Britain we have the Festival of the Unexceptional; out here it’s the Concours D’Lemons. And having now attended both, I’m afraid to report our domestic event has a lot of catching up to do. Would you find a 1971 Lincoln covered in green towelling with a life-sized model of a horse sticking out of the roof? Not on my last visit. A 1977 Porsche 911 SC with the singular distinction of, judging by both its look and smell, having been ablaze from end to end in the very recent past? Not to my recollection. There was a Subaru 360 proudly proclaiming itself to be the ‘worst car sold in the US’ and a VW Microbus with the wheelbase of a kiddies’ go-kart and the ability to fry sausages from the flames jetting out of its exhaust.

Here you could find genuine tat from end to end. They were grouped together in categories such as ‘Rust Belt American Junk’, ‘Soul-Sucking Japanese Appliance’ and ‘Der Self Satisfied Karutten Wagon’ which I fear is a misspelling, ‘Rueful Britannia’ and my particular favourite ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ with the first two words crossed out.

And while there were some impressive examples of European collaboration, such as a rusting Slough-built Citroën Traction Avant carrying a sign saying ‘Caution: French Car with British Electrics’, really it was the Americans that carried the day. They were all there from Edsel Fords to AMC Pacers. Breaking Bad fans will be delighted to learn there were Pontiac Azteks helping to keep the flag flying and even a Bricklin SV-1. The only car I’d hoped to see was an AMC Gremlin, but I spent so much of my time wandering around in a total daze at all the glorious awfulness on display, it’s entirely possible I missed it.

This is a glorious event, located in a parking lot by the side of a busy freeway with absolutely no facilities whatsoever. I asked someone if there was somewhere we could grab a coffee and he proudly told me that there had been but it had run out two hours earlier and hadn’t been worth drinking in any case. At the time the event had been open for exactly three hours. Unlike The Quail, it’s free for spectators, and for entrants bribing the judges to make sure your car wins its category is not merely tolerated, but actively encouraged.

Day Three: Pebble Beach Concours, Sunday 18 August

I nearly didn’t go to the other concours in town, the one held for a rather different kind of car and customer to those attending the charming D’Lemons. This is the one located at Pebble Beach where billionaire captains of industry are reduced to humble supplicants, obliged to doff metaphorical caps and tug imaginary forelocks in the direction of those be-Panama’d judges in whose hands their cars briefly reside. For they know this: a win at Pebble will add another telephone number to the presumably already astonishing value of their machine. And for that it is worth becoming someone else briefly but entirely.

I’d been before and scoffed at the sight of what those in the British classic car industry refer to without perhaps the purest of intentions as ‘American Restorations’: cars so shiny you need welding goggles just to look at them. These are cars which are so perfect as to almost not be cars any more, certainly insofar as they are essentially unusable and therefore more qualified to call themselves sculpture than transport.

Besides, to go again would mean another day away which I could well do without. It was only the chance to see a nephew who’s moved to the west coast and was in Monterey for the same reason as I that persuaded me to stick around.

I’m so glad I did. Yes the shiny stuff was all still there, but since my last visit perhaps 10 years ago, the event has broadened in scope and deepened beyond measure in the kind of quality than can be measured not by ensuring all the screwheads are pointing in precisely the same direction and taking pipe-cleaners to tyre treads to find, capture and expel the last fragment of Monterey grass that may have adhered thereto, but by simple beauty, or importance, rarity or interest.

We’ll start with the Ferraris. All the moderns were there and few were crowding around them, which was understandable when you saw the GTOs, Short Wheelbases and even a vanishingly rare 275 NART Spider a few yards away. But it was the P4s, three of them (okay, technically the one in the colours of Ecurie Nationale Belge is a 412P, a customer-specification P4 less one valve per cylinder and running on carbs not fuel injection) that made me gaze, gawp and return later in the day to see them again. To me these are the most beautiful cars in existence and to see half the P4s ever made (and one quarter of the 412Ps) occupying the same piece of turf is a sight I hope never leaves me.

Over among the concept cars it seemed like the organisers had climbed into my head in the small hours and extracted the names of every styling study I’d ever drooled over as a boy, and then assembled them on the Pebble Beach lawn. The BMW E25 Turbo concept built for the 1972 Munich Olympics still looks wildly fresh, the Mercedes C111 prototype no less gorgeous today than most of a lifetime ago. There was the Stratos HF Zero concept – so low that Nuccio Bertone drove it under the security barrier at Lancia in his attempt to persuade the company to build it – looking as amazing today as in 1970, and the similar vintage Ferrari 512 Modulo looking as batshit crazy as ever.

I saw a Cizeta-Moroder V16T (one of just nine completed) up close for the first time since 1991 and got to goggle at its extraordinary 6-litre V16 motor, slung east west across the engine bay; there was one of Jerry Wiegert’s 22 twin-turbo 6-litre V8 Vector W8s which was meant to do well over 200mph but never did; the Aston Bulldog was there plus road and racing versions of the Bugatti EB110, Mercedes CLK GTR, Porsche 993 GT2, Jaguar XJ220, Ferrari F40 and McLaren F1. At times it was hard to know where to look.

Favourites? From the pre-war era, the Bugatti Type 55. Mercedes was not the first to take the powertrain of a Grand Prix car and put it in a road going machine: 90 years earlier Ettore Bugatti took his Type 51 GP car, complete with its supercharged, 2.3-litre straight-eight engine and draped over it a body that still makes my knees go weak. Capable of 125mph, it is the car that is the true inspiration for today’s Bugatti Tourbillon.

Postwar it has to be the Ferrari 330 P4 coupé. Obviously. But for me, and if I may be spared a moment’s self-indulgence, the car that brought me up short was one I’d not seen since 2 May 1994.

When people talk to me today about the day we did the only official road test of the McLaren F1, people always talk about the XP5 prototype, because that’s the car in all the photographs and which I drove from Bruntingthorpe where the acceleration runs were conducted, up to and across the North York Moors which even today may still be the most memorable road car journey of my life. And I still get to see XP5 quite a lot, because it’s owned by and lives with McLaren in Woking. Indeed as recently as 2019 I did 180mph in it back at Bruntingthorpe in celebration of the 25^th anniversary of that test. But… actually the numbers that were recorded that day were extracted from another F1, prototype XP4. McLaren wanted us to use that for the acceleration tests because XP5 was immaculate and needed preserving for the shoot. I also have a dim memory that XP4 was quite a bit lighter too.

This then is the car in which I first did 200mph, accelerating there from rest in less than 30 seconds. It’s the car whose rear wing then didn’t flip up when it was meant to, in order to move the centre of pressure when I started to slow from 211mph, and it was the car that required most of the width of a runway designed for V-bombers before it ran straight and true again. I’ve not seen it from that day to this.

Yet there it was, looking immaculate on the Pebble Beach lawn. Seeing it there was like meeting up with someone with whom you’d had a whirlwind romance 30 years ago and not seen since. The only difference was that XP4 looked not one whit less gorgeous in 2024 than it did in 1994, a claim which, with the very best will in the world, I would not seek to make for myself.

Having been pretty sniffy about Pebble Beach, I’m now already trying to devise excuses to get me back there. Indeed it was one of those weekends that kept getting better: to be honest, I was amused by the novelty value of The Quail, but it soon wore off; the Concours d’Lemons was heartwarming and wonderful and Pebble Beach a gathering of automotive royalty rivalled in the world so far as I am aware by Goodwood alone. And I haven’t even mentioned the auctions that saw a nine-digit dollar value of cars fall under the gavel.

Walking out of Pebble Beach, me and the aforementioned nephew walked straight past a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport not on display, but rather poorly parked in a small lot of otherwise humdrum cars. Neither of us even mentioned it. It was that kind of weekend.