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Written by Jason Barlow
Monterey week is an extended three-Michelin-star automotive extravaganza, with Pebble Beach as the rousing piece de resistance. But sometimes you just want a burger. At the Concours d"Lemons, now into its eighth glorious year, you don"t even get that. No, this is a plate of beans. Served cold, out of the can.Criteria for entry is simple. "We allow bad examples of good cars, and good examples of bad cars," co-founder Alain Galbraith says. He then takes to the microphone to outline exactly what sort of bribery the judges, this year including former Ford, Mercedes and VW designer Freeman Thomas, are likely to respond most positively to. Beer, mainly. (Alcohol, Galbraith avers, may have played a part in the event"s conception.)Needless to say, the communal tongue is wedged firmly in cheek. The fact is, the Concours d"Lemons is an absolutely magnificent riposte to the earnestness found elsewhere hereabouts this week. Approximately 150 cars turned up (I didn"t count them all, to be honest, some were simply too terrifying to approach), many of which were laden with a narrative that made the Pebble Beach stars look like lawnmowers. This year, a spin-off Lemons rally saw the truly intrepid make their way to Seaside, California via Death Valley and Vegas. That must have looked like an improvised homage to last year"s hysterically good Mad Max reboot. Someone did it in a Mercedes W123, which had lost its bonnet along the way. Or maybe didn"t even have one in the first place.Categories include Kommunist Kar", Unmitigated Gaul", Needlessly Complex Italian", and Rueful Britannia". In the latter, our star was a 1965 Wolseley Hornet convertible, owned by the redoubtable Derek Tuttle, a serial Mini owner from nearby Santa Cruz with another 12 variants of Mini back home. This particular car was one of 57 converted by Crayford at the behest of Heinz as competition prizes back in the mid-1960s. Astonishingly, Derek reckons five have made their way to the US, and his wound up here via unusual means. "I deal mainly in Morgans," his brother Toby tells me. "So we sent the Hornet to Morgan in Malvern where it sat for four months before being shipped over." The brothers and two other family members drove the car here, the chassis visibly sagging.Ken Mitchell"s gorgeous little Vespa 400 tested the Lemons definitional limit for me personally; apparently, parent company ACMA Fourchamboult made 340,000 of the things, between 1957 and 1961, before giving up. "I used to be a Renault man," Ken says, and still keeps an R4 van at home. "But I decided to broaden my horizons."I also appreciated if that"s the word William Hughes" disgusting Mercury Comet, Kevin Wood"s Mercury Gran Marquis (vibrant purple with plush gold interior), a fabulous 1959 Tempo Matador Camper, and Ken Nelson"s Panhard PL17 Tigre . The worst-in-show" was a fabulously horrible Bricklin, a US sports car that failed even more heinously than the DeLorean. Ron Stillman had opted to cover his otherwise lovely Dodge Challenger in Nesquik for that authentically corroded look ("don"t touch it! Don"t clean it!" he protested), while I could have happily driven off in the mint Renault 16 TX that had evidently gatecrashed the party, and was clearly not meant to be there.Hmm. Just me, huhPhotography: Webb Bland
Date written: 25 Aug 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 4791
Monterey week is an extended three-Michelin-star automotive extravaganza, with Pebble Beach as the rousing piece de resistance. But sometimes you just want a burger. At the Concours d"Lemons, now into its eighth glorious year, you don"t even get that. No, this is a plate of beans. Served cold, out of the can.Criteria for entry is simple. "We allow bad examples of good cars, and good examples of bad cars," co-founder Alain Galbraith says. He then takes to the microphone to outline exactly what sort of bribery the judges, this year including former Ford, Mercedes and VW designer Freeman Thomas, are likely to respond most positively to. Beer, mainly. (Alcohol, Galbraith avers, may have played a part in the event"s conception.)Needless to say, the communal tongue is wedged firmly in cheek. The fact is, the Concours d"Lemons is an absolutely magnificent riposte to the earnestness found elsewhere hereabouts this week. Approximately 150 cars turned up (I didn"t count them all, to be honest, some were simply too terrifying to approach), many of which were laden with a narrative that made the Pebble Beach stars look like lawnmowers. This year, a spin-off Lemons rally saw the truly intrepid make their way to Seaside, California via Death Valley and Vegas. That must have looked like an improvised homage to last year"s hysterically good Mad Max reboot. Someone did it in a Mercedes W123, which had lost its bonnet along the way. Or maybe didn"t even have one in the first place.Categories include Kommunist Kar", Unmitigated Gaul", Needlessly Complex Italian", and Rueful Britannia". In the latter, our star was a 1965 Wolseley Hornet convertible, owned by the redoubtable Derek Tuttle, a serial Mini owner from nearby Santa Cruz with another 12 variants of Mini back home. This particular car was one of 57 converted by Crayford at the behest of Heinz as competition prizes back in the mid-1960s. Astonishingly, Derek reckons five have made their way to the US, and his wound up here via unusual means. "I deal mainly in Morgans," his brother Toby tells me. "So we sent the Hornet to Morgan in Malvern where it sat for four months before being shipped over." The brothers and two other family members drove the car here, the chassis visibly sagging.Ken Mitchell"s gorgeous little Vespa 400 tested the Lemons definitional limit for me personally; apparently, parent company ACMA Fourchamboult made 340,000 of the things, between 1957 and 1961, before giving up. "I used to be a Renault man," Ken says, and still keeps an R4 van at home. "But I decided to broaden my horizons."I also appreciated if that"s the word William Hughes" disgusting Mercury Comet, Kevin Wood"s Mercury Gran Marquis (vibrant purple with plush gold interior), a fabulous 1959 Tempo Matador Camper, and Ken Nelson"s Panhard PL17 Tigre . The worst-in-show" was a fabulously horrible Bricklin, a US sports car that failed even more heinously than the DeLorean. Ron Stillman had opted to cover his otherwise lovely Dodge Challenger in Nesquik for that authentically corroded look ("don"t touch it! Don"t clean it!" he protested), while I could have happily driven off in the mint Renault 16 TX that had evidently gatecrashed the party, and was clearly not meant to be there.Hmm. Just me, huhPhotography: Webb Bland
Date written: 25 Aug 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 4791
