What makes a concours special part 1: Going behind the curtain

By David S. Wallens
Aug 8, 2024 | Concours, Amelia Island, Concours d'Elegance, The Amelia, Bill Warner | Posted in Features | From the March 2023 issue | Never miss an article

Part 1 in a series. More to come: judging explained, meet a perfect concours car, and discover what it’s like to show a car at Monterey.

“If you’re inviting everybody to come and bring what they have, that’s a car show,” explains Bill Warner, creator of The Amelia. A concours, he stresses, is different: “Each car on that field has to be there for a reason.”

The raison d’etre for a concours, at least initially, was to showcase modern style. “As it was envisioned by the French,” he continues, a concours would pair “the latest coachwork with the latest fashions.”

Following that logic, he argues, today’s auto shows could be considered concours. “That means that the Detroit auto show is a concours,” he muses. “It’s the latest car show.”

The early days of Pebble Beach, likewise, gathered the latest machines–although it was originally conceived as an effort to broaden the weekend’s appeal. “The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance began in tandem with the Pebble Beach Road Races in 1950, but in truth the concours was a last-minute addition–a social gathering intended to add a bit of style to the much-anticipated main event,” the event’s website explains.

The winner of that first Pebble Beach concours? Sterling Edwards’ take on the ultimate dual-purpose machine, his 1950 Edwards R-26 Special Sport Roadster. Entering it in the concours was a last-minute decision, though, as Edwards’ focus was the race. In fact, he helped conceive the idea of the wheel-to-wheel contest, where he finished in 14th place; Phil Hill won it in a Jaguar XK120.



The first winner at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, surprisingly, wasn’t a prewar machine. It was Sterling Edwards’ then-new race car. Photography Credit: Courtesy Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance

The following year, a 1951 Jaguar Mark VII Saloon took top honors. New cars from Jaguar and Austin-Healey continued to claim the top prize until Phil Hill’s 1931 Pierce-Arrow won in 1955. Since then, however, postwar cars took best in show only two more times: a 1964 Maserati Mistral Coupe in 1968 and a 1954 Ferrari 375 MM Scaglietti Coupe 46 years later.

“A concours has to present something that’s out of the normal,” Warner explains. “If you’re charging somebody $175, you don’t want them to see something that they can see Saturday night at the Wendy’s.”

Pebble Beach has retained its stature over the generations by assembling cars that most people simply never catch a glimpse of: the ultra-rare, the ultra-exotic, the ultra-special.

“They get cars that are shown for the first time,” Warner notes, adding that he had to go in a different direction when launching his Amelia Island event in 1996. “We couldn’t get the classics or the French cars for the first time, so we’d get the race cars or the goofy cars for the first time.”

Vision Matters

Having a reason for each car’s inclusion in a concours comes from curation, Warner explains: “A concours has to be by invitation only. And the person running the concours has to have a vision on what he wants, and has to have specific certain themes, and has to celebrate certain milestones of the automobile.”

He brings up the Ford Mustang as an example. “Everybody remembers the Mustang,” he says, noting how a concours could include all the early rarities that people don’t normally get to see: the prototypes, the wagons, the versions that never made it to the dealership.

“And if you do a stock Mustang, you get a 289 Hi-Po convertible as the base,” he continues. “Here is the standard Mustang,” he says of the production convertible. “Here are the Mustangs you’ve never seen,” he notes of the rest.

“You just can’t roll out Mustangs. It becomes a car show when you roll out Mustangs. It’s gotta give the people something they’ve never seen.”



If a concours is going to feature early Mustangs today, how about including the shortened, fiberglass-bodied 19641/2 factory show car? Photography Credit: David S. Wallens

As that first Pebble Beach concours was added to the weekend’s card to increase its appeal, classes can achieve something similar today. “I love the year we did the cars of ‘Big Daddy’ Roth,” Warner says. That 2018 showfield was awash with whimsical styling, candy apple paint and all the chrome.

The field even included the Beatnik Bandit, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s famed 1961 hotrod. Roth paraded his pearlescent white creation around the country in the early ’60s, while Revell released its 1/25 scale version in 1963. Five years later, the Beatnik Bandit was further immortalized as one of the initial 16 die-cast cars from Hot Wheels. Hot Rod Magazine has since named it one of the top 10 hotrods of all time, and it’s now part of the National Auto Museum (The Harrah Collection).

At Amelia, attendees got to peek inside the clear bubble top, where, instead of the traditional controls, they found just a central joystick for speed, direction and brakes–along with plenty of white Naugahyde.

“They were bizarre, they were off the wall, they were a form of artform of the ’60s,” Warner explains of the Ed Roth cars. The grouping also appealed to another important type of attendee, he notes: the non-car enthusiast.