Advertisement

My first Pebble Beach car bacchanalia, where too much is never enough

Click for gallery
Click for gallery

A ten-year-old boy, as blond and wide-eyed as Richie Rich from his bow-tie to his short pants, sat in a 1932 Morgan Aero Super Sports, fielding inquiries from admirers.

“Do you prefer the four-wheel or the three-wheel?” a man asked him, taking amused photos.

“Oh, I prefer the three-wheel,” the boy said.

He got out of the car.

“I’m gonna go eat ice cream now,” he said. “Actually, I’m gonna go check out the Lamborghini stand.”

The Quail motorsports gathering.
The Quail motorsports gathering.

This piquant scene took place at The Quail, the Friday party at a fancy country club that’s fondly thought of as a laid-back alternative for vintage car lovers during Pebble Beach weekend. Tickets start around $500, meaning it’s an excellent place to watch the obscenely wealthy in their natural habitat. In addition to seemingly endless displays of new-production Bugattis and Paganis and Maseratis and AMGs and Land Rover Extended Wheelbase Heritage Whatevers, there’s also an extraordinary, though manageable, array of impeccably restored vintage cars on hand, from late-50s Mercedes roadsters to a golfing green of “The Great Ferraris,” to a 1912 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost to the Von-Will “Bob Justice” Mustang of Wharton, Texas, as well as a 1930 Alfa Romeo GC 1750 Gran Sport Zagato that has never seen the parking lot of a Kroger’s. In the Quail parking lot, on the other hand, $250,000 Bentley convertibles sit as ordinarily as Honda Accords, and in similar numbers.

Your Quail ticket—or your mooched press pass—gets you unlimited access to looking at these cars, as well as their owners and restorers. It also lets you visit booths for such high-end products as Payne Mason Cigars, Steinway pianos, and “The Super Yacht Authority.” You can sample an unlimited supply of top-flight alcohol and food, available at tasteful intervals, accompanied by interchanges like this one:

“Hey, Walker, do me a solid,” a young linen-clad man said as he handed his crystal champagne flute off to his friend. “I gotta get some of these oysters.”

While I stood in a half-hour line for a tasting, someone asked me, without apparent irony, “Do you have a favorite caviar?” An hour later, as I gorged on thin-crust pizza in the Italian tent, a straw-hat wearing swell said, “it’s like walking through the dorm food line in college.” My dorm cafeteria didn’t serve Wood-Grilled Monterey Calamari with white beans and roasted peppers, but that was a while ago, and maybe things have changed.

But the food is but a tasty sidebar. As everyone defensively told me all weekend, it’s all about the cars. If you love them, Pebble Beach yields the Earth’s richest ore.

The Quail gathering. Photos by Ian Merritt
The Quail gathering. Photos by Ian Merritt

At mid-afternoon at the Quail, as I sat with some car-journalist colleagues chatting amiably about the benefits of freeloading, a determined madman approached. His name was Mark Gessler, and he made his fortune in the genetics racket. Now he’s the founder and president of the Historic Vehicle Association, based in suburban D.C., and he’s also the driving force behind the National Historic Vehicle Register. He organized, as he told us in near-excruciating detail, the first-ever vintage car show on the National Mall.

Gessler has catholic tastes, with a small c. The first car on the NHVR, named this January, was the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe Prototype, a logical choice. The second, crowned in May, was “Old Red,” the first Meyers Manx dune buggy, from 1964.

He pointed out that Old Red was sitting right behind us, as was its creator, Bruce Meyers, who, at 88 years old, had driven it up to Monterey from Los Angeles. Meyers looked more virile and full-chested than the late-era Norman Mailer. He glowed proudly as several of his creations—“I built 5,200 of ‘em, that took a lot of doing”—sat there in equivalent standing with a 1966 Plymouth Satellite and a 1959 Aston Martin D8. Of particular note was a groovy number with hideous flowered vinyl patterning on the roof and the seats, which Meyers calls “The Mod Car.”

“I took it to a car show,” he said. “It was purple metal flake. We made the seats out of garden furniture. People love it so much that we want to make them again. But we can’t find the material.”

A little later, Meyers said, “My Manxes all have flat fenders.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“So you can put a bottle of beer on it!” he cackled, while putting a bottle of beer on it.

That night, I went to a car auction. If you go to Pebble Beach and don’t, you’re missing out, since the whole point of all the weekend’s champagne-soaked frippery is that this is the world’s largest car sale, where price is no object and money doesn’t mean shit. Nearly $400 million exchanged hands last weekend.

There are several sales, but I went to the RM Auctions one, held at the Portola Hotel in downtown Monterey. Outside, vintage muscle cars roared in a circle around the fountain at the hotel entrance, giving a large crowd of plebes a vicarious thrill and a lungful of vintage lead. Inside, disreputable characters were trying to argue their way into the auction hall. Some of them breached the gates.

I weaseled in just as the thrilling final bids emerged for a 1964 Ferrari 250 LM by Scaglietti. The market for Ferraris, always potent, was particularly hot this year. The night before, one had gone for a record-setting $38 million (including taxes and fees), breaking the previous car-auction record by a lot. The 1964 was a bargain by comparison, selling for $11,550,000, that extra $50,000 being too much, apparently, for the competitive bidder. The room erupted in applause for the winner, as if to say, “Yay, you’re rich!”

After that crowning cargasm, the crowd thinned a lot. I took a seat close to the front, so I could have a good look at the auctioneer, a young British gentleman who effectively presided with an air of cloying dickishness. “Three hundred ten thousand,” he said, regarding a 1951 Delahaye that eventually went for $412,500, “Do you really want to lose that bid? You might be down a pair of shoes, but you’ll be up a car.”

Right behind us, a guy bought a 1952 Jaguar XK120 Fixed Head Coupe for $154,000. There was much kissing and hand-shaking among his group, who were clearly excited to have scored. “Congratulations for everything!” someone said to the winner, the key phrase that welcomes people to the ruling class.

I was sitting next to a charming L.A. television type whom had taken this press trip with his wife as a retirement present. When a 2003 Aston Martin by Zagato came up for bid, he leaned in and whispered:

“I’m interested to see how much this goes for. Aston lent me one when it was a new production car. It was also the show car for The O.C. and Vegas. I had it for 40 seconds before I wrecked it. Never even got it off the street where we live. That car cost the networks hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was at CBS at the time. Vegas was on NBC. My boss wanted to give me a raise.”

The Aston went for $269,500.

The televison man looked terribly pleased.

From Friday through Sunday on Pebble Beach weekend, the Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca hosts the world’s best “heritage racing” showcase this side of Goodwood, England. Unlike British heritage racing, where Lords and Dukes of all stripes do battle with vintage motorcars en lieu of swords, American heritage racing isn’t particularly competitive. It’s just a chance for the wealthy to stage their brilliantly restored rockets in a high-speed parade. The stakes are low. They don’t give out trophies for race winners, but for more intangible “good driving” qualities, like coming from the back of the pack to make a respectable showing, or somehow managing to keep a car from 1937 going 80 miles an hour for 15 minutes straight. Such a feat shouldn’t be underestimated, even in the service of a rich man’s hobby.

Like a good old-school racetrack should be, Laguna Seca is hot and dusty and it stinks like death. The food is lousy and expensive and the fans bake in the bleachers like Pop-n-Fresh buns. If you’re nostalgic for such things, then that’s your place. In the pits, serious work gets done.

Since they own the naming rights to the track, no one is more serious than the Mazda racing team. They’d better put up a good showing, or else. Unfortunately, their dominance was placed in serious peril on Friday when the half shaft that transfers the drive from the differential to the left wheel snapped on a 1990 Mazda 787. This magnificent Japanese beast had run Class C in LeMans, finishing 8th in 1991, but the broken shaft put its triumphant return in serious jeopardy. A frantic series of calls were made. This led to the discovery that the previous year’s model had an identical part.

Unfortunately, that model was in Atlanta.

So, at considerable expense, Mazda arranged to have the shaft flown from Atlanta to San Jose. Even with the three-hour time-change, it wasn’t going to get to California until 8 p.m. on Saturday. When that moment arrived, Jeremy Barnes, the public-relations director for the Mazda corporation, and himself a Sunday racer, looked at the delivery status. It said, “MISSING.”

Barnes went into a barely-controlled panic. He called Federal Express, who apologized. They said they’d call him every half an hour with updates. Sooner, if the item was found. At midnight, Barnes got the call. The shaft had accidentally been flown to LAX. FedEx had placed it on a ground courier, and it was currently whaling its way up the coast.

At 5:30 a.m., the truck pulled up at Laguna Seca.

The shaft had arrived.

Damn right.

The crew was already waiting. They were on that shaft faster than Ginger Lynn Allen, and the 787 was ready to go before breakfast. Because of its injury, the 787 had been placed way in the back, in 29th position, so there was no way it was going to win. But it roared forth nobly, and ended up finishing 4th overall.

It was a great showing for Mazda racing, and for its seemingly unlimited courier budget. Another car actually won its race. Barnes himself battled hard, actually catching up to, and passing, a 1990 Nissan 300ZX driven by Steve Millen, which ran in ISMA GTO and finished in 4th place the year the Mazda RX-7 won the championship. I have no idea what any of that means, but Barnes described it like he’d won the Powerball. His bucket list will be full forevermore.

“He did not want to let me by,” Barnes said later. “But that’s the thing you have to understand about racers. Racers never quit.”

Click for gallery
Click for gallery

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday for a 5 a.m. shuttle to Pebble Beach. As the rookie member of the reporting team, I was assigned the “Dawn Patrol” shift at the Concours D’Elegance. The wealthy like to rise early, and so do car people, so Dawn Patrol is the unholy union. Dawn Patrol is considered a great badge of honor for Concours fans, because, as more than one person told me, “That’s when the cars move.” Also, they like to go to Dawn Patrol because they get a free hat. I have plenty of hats, so I skipped that option. But I did eat a fresh chocolate donut.

It was appropriately dawn when the old cars came sputtering onto the Concours. I was right up against the plastic links, sucking fumes, and, in some cases, steam, witnessing an extraordinary display of Dusenbergs and Ruxtons, Tatras and Pierce Arrows, cars rarely seen in the wild. The automotive media, as usual working harder than necessary, took action shots while the drivers waved and the rest of the crowd went pip pip cheerio.

“Oh, she’s driving,” said a woman next to me. “Good for her!”

After a couple of hours, which included 15 minutes of strolling behind, but not actually meeting, Jerry Seinfeld on the 18th green at Pebble Beach, I went back to my hotel room for a three-hour nap. I returned to the Concours at 1 p.m. to find wealthy people very much on display, some of them wearing hats that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Seurat painting. Through another act of journalistic weaseldom, I conned my way into the Jaguar/Land Rover luxury suite, where I found myself lunching with the dashing Justin Bell, former LeMans champion and burgeoning international motorsports TV commentator.

The cars began to make their way up to the stand for judging. A ludicrous example of 1930s excess stopped in front of us, idling, killing the planet.

“That is why the class divide came about in the U.K.,” Bell said. “You’re sitting there in the open air and the rain is pissing down. And your employers are sitting in the back.”

“What’s the advantage to the driver getting wet?” a friend of Bell’s asked.

“So you don’t have to talk to your man!” Bell said. “Imagine. You’re flat on your ass, making haypenny a month, and one of those comes roaring through. No wonder there was a social change.”

Bell looked out over the railing. The bay sat placidly. In front of it, and despite a state-destroying drought that will kill us all, the spoils of multiple empires rolled forward on the lush green carpet of the world’s greatest golf course. He sighed.

“Well,” he said, “this is rather pleasant, isn’t it?”

The moment of victory for Jon Shirley's 1963 Ferrari. Click for gallery
The moment of victory for Jon Shirley's 1963 Ferrari. Click for gallery

After lunch, I disgorged myself into a terrible orgy of excess. Drunken rich people were everywhere, craning their necks to look at the vintage beauties now being judged. I noticed a young man, dressed in linen, flanked by two beautiful women in near-matching colorful outfits that wouldn’t have been far out of place in Easter Parade.

“How do you do it?” I asked. “Not a hair out of place.”

“Some habits are unbreakable,” the man said.

This was Gordon Logan, Jr., the son of the founder of the SportClips empire. Like me, he was from Austin, Texas; he visited Pebble Beach three years ago in competition with his great-great grandfather’s 1928 Packard, and he was hooked. “The first time coming to Pebble Beach, and I’m in the show,” he said. “It’s like drinking from a firehose.”

By then, it was 4 p.m., and a feeling of finality began to creep into the air. Jay Leno took the microphone for his usual end-of-orgy shtick. “I saw something today I’ve never seen before,” he said. “An old rich guy walking around. It was unbelievable.”

Soon after that, a silver 1954 Ferrari 375 MM, owned by old rich guy Jon Shirley of Medina, Wash., drove away with Best In Show, in what was termed a “shocking upset” by anyone who was paying attention. It was the first post-war car to win the award since the 1960s. Everyone cheered as the former president of Microsoft and his vintage Ferrari got showered with confetti.

In a summer when the world has completely gone to hell, this living metaphor of the one percent celebrating itself disgusted me to the core. But I still look forward to my freebie for next year’s Concours, because I'm not sure how else I'll ever go back.

It was rather pleasant, wasn’t it?