Monday – Tuesday

There are a lot of great car activities free of charge.  The Automobilia show Monday and Tuesday is always a treat to walk through. We’ve found some hard to find items there, like the leather helmet and goggles Gayle wanted to wear when driving her Beck 550 Spyder. It was made in France, just like the originals.

Tuesday the Concours on the Avenue in Carmel-by-the-sea is a great way to start the week with 18 blocks of the downtown area roped off, showcasing a variety of cars. Walk around and enjoy the cars and take a break for a fine lunch at any of the many upscale restaurants the cars will be parked in front of (be sure to save extra $s for the great meals available in the Monterey area).

Wednesday

We attend good friend, Gordon McCall’s, Motorworks Revival on Wednesday night at the Monterey Jet Center.  Jets, fine automobiles and great people watching it’s how we normally start our Monterey Week. There are several attendee packages available in the three digit price range. This year, amongst other amazing vehicles and jets (of which you can go inside and tour (and dream) was Camilo Pardo and his beautiful Ford GT, which he had me sign, as seen here.

Thursday thru Saturday

There are numerous car auctions occurring during the week such as Mecum, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Russo and Steele. Many, if not all, require a paid admittance. It’s not a bad way though to see a lot of fine cars as well as their estimated values at a less expensive price of admission than some of the car shows. Look at the cars, take a seat and enjoy the bidding. It’s a fine way to spend some time. It’s not unusual for me to give some background on a car at an auction, as seen here.

All throughout the week, including Sunday

Laguna Seca is humming like a hive with track practice, qualifying and racing on Saturday and Sunday. Reasonably priced, a lot of action and attendees in jeans, it’s where I try to spend most of my time during Monterey Car Week.

Saturday

A highlight for us this year was the Concours d’Lemons, another free event, this one held in a park near the Embassy Suites in Seaside. Held on the Saturday of Monterey Car Week, it features the deplorables of the automotive world. Gayle and I haven’t laughed that hard in ages. What a hoot! My favorite was a rusted out Karmen Ghia with tarp straps holding down the hood, duct tape over a headlight, a patina that can’t be described and too many other features to mention. Gayle and I were interviewed about the event, showcasing a Sci-Fi B-Movie Packard for a TV show in France called “Turbo”.  We had a great time and highly recommend this Saturday morning event.

We then went from Lemons to the Concorso Italiano. This is a long standing event that has evolved to include many marques. Special cars are brought up to the announcer’s stand where the crowd is educated on that particular auto’s specialness. Seen here is the DeTomaso P72 with Matt Stone interviewing me about the car on stage. It’s a nice event.

Throughout the week are various special events and unveilings, such as the U.S. unveiling of the De Tomaso P72 on Thursday at the Pebble Beach Lodge. I have been honored to have De Tomaso include me, and the P70 I designed in 1964, at the worldwide unveiling at Goodwood and the US unveiling. I was especially thrilled when the fine folks at DeTomaso presented me with this lifetime of design achievement award. It looks really good in my awards case at the BRE shop! Sunday is of course the Pebble Beach Concours.

First, thanks for acknowledging the book award. Time passes so quickly we haven’t had a chance to even post the news on our own social media pages. The award is a real honor, especially considering the competition it was up against and that it’s a reasonably priced soft cover book. I never thought it would be a contender but thankfully the judges focused on the content and quality.

The book covers my years of design at Shelby's. Several cars are covered in detail such as the Nethercutt Mirage, Lang Cooper and of course the Shelby - DeTomaso P70. My time designing the P70 in Modena, Italy was some of the most educational and enjoyable of my life.

To celebrate the Gold award and the excitement around the DeTomaso P72 being at Monterey next week we’re offering a special on the book. This applies ONLY from the time of this posting through Friday August 30^th 5pm Pacific Time. 15% off brings the price of this “awarding winning!” book to only $29.71.  Get yours now!

Now on to the DeTomaso P72. When I saw the car at Goodwood I was really impressed. I evidently wasn’t the only one as the DeTomaso people just informed me that ALL 72 cars they plan to build have been sold! Pretty incredible if true. What interests me about this success… oh wait, let me address the comments about the P72 not having any resemblance to my P70.

I don’t think Jowyn Wong, the P72’s designer, ever had any intention of following my lines exactly. The P72 is simply an homage to the mid ‘60s era in GT form.  Yes, there are a couple of subtle details but this is Jowyn’s creation completely and I think it’s pretty wonderful. It’s a return to the soft sensual forms of those cars that were built in Modena back then. There were really some fine, sharp-edged designs being created in that era by Giugiarao, like his fabulous Mangusta, but those were created as forms that could use the crisp-edge tooling available for production cars like Tjaarda’ s Pantera.  Cars being hand-built in Modena were, by necessity, much softer as each was essentially a hand hammered form.

Others have commented that the P72 looks similar to Ferraris’ P3 and P4. Possibly… if so that’s a real compliment but I feel that Wong had his own ideas of what a “retro looking” GT DeTomaso should look like. Government regulations continually change, so cars have to change to keep up. In addition, new technologies (e.g. lights and lower profile tires with larger diameter wheels) allow for different shapes to be created. I think the comparison images of the P70 and the P72 in inverse seen to the right  (which will be offered as a limited edition poster at Monterey next week) show some inspirational “resemblance”.  Pretty cool…a real honor for a design that’s now more than 50 years old!

Now back to what I find amazing about the success of the P72.  It’s acceptance and success is all based on the car’s visual appearance; its aesthetic DESIGN. The car’s power plant and chassis details haven’t even been released . The P72 concept shown at Goodwood was based on the same organization’s Apollo car, which is more of a racing GT.  The P72 is a real GT designed for the street.

The P72 will be shown at Monterey next week for the first time in the U.S. We’ll be there at a press event at Pebble on Thursday and with the car at the Concours Italiano on Saturday. Friday we’ll be at the Bonhams auction at the Quail when the original DeTomaso P70 will be auctioned (approximately 11:30am). It’s going to be a very DeTomaso week for us at Monterey. Very exciting!  We hope to see you there.

It amazes me how this race still sets off people’s passions. No one would probably even remember it today if it weren’t for those hard-core Alfa fans who mistakenly insist the cheating Alfa was robbed of the championship.  More than 10 years ago, after a Trans-Am panel discussion at the Petersen Museum, we sent out a newsletter that mentioned how the driver of the cheater Alfa admitted it was a cheater car. We couldn’t believe the mail I got from people saying they had thought more of me than to make something like that up! The whole discourse is on tape. All of us who were there heard it but of course we knew the whole story because we were so deeply involved in the controversy.

There are so many rumors still circulating about that race, like how I paid someone off to have the Laguna Seca race added to the calendar at the end of the season so we’d have a chance to get more points and beat the Alfas for the championship. I wouldn’t even have known how to do that and I certainly wouldn’t have done anything the Japanese (the honorable Mr. K at Datsun) would have thought inappropriate. For those that don’t know the story of what happened let me digress. In our first year of running the BRE Datsun 510s in the 2.5 Trans-Am series in 1971 we were behind the seasoned and favored Alfas in points almost to the end of the year. But, thanks to our amazing team and driver, John Morton, we were steadily gaining on them as we improved our cars. We had a really good shot at winning the last race at Laguna Seca. Winning that crucial event would give Datsun/Nissan the necessary points to win the SCCA’s 2.5 Trans-Am championship.

During the race the lead Alfa, driven by Horst Kwech, and our leading 510 with John Morton behind the wheel, were battling hard. Kwech kept trying to run John off the track (another controversy is whether or not Kwech was doing this intentionally). Kwech knew that even if he crashed into Morton and they both went out, there were several other fast Alfas running. If we went out and any of them finished, Alfa would win the championship. This championship battle brought thousands of fans to Laguna to see this final race. The race was a barn burner that still has those who were there saying it was one of the greatest races they’d ever seen. After a lot of trading paint Kwech’s Alfa hit John right at the top of the corkscrew, spinning him out but John quickly recovered and was back on track re-passing the Alfa which then hit him again! That’s when I decided these two needed to be separated because it was obvious that Kwech would continue hitting John and it didn’t matter if he took himself out in the battle. I signaled John in for the one pit stop we’d have to make for fuel. That put Kwech well in the lead, but I knew he’d also have to stop for fuel as there was no way he could run the distance on the 15 gallons the cars were permitted to run. Only Kwech never stopped! His Alfa cruised on to an easy win and miraculously sputtered out of fuel just past the finish line! It appeared that Kwech had gambled on having enough fuel to finish the race. But I knew better.

If this had happened earlier in the season he might have gotten away with this but by the end of the season we had learned the Alfa could only run about one hour and seven minutes on a full tank. I pulled John in for fuel at one hour and ten minutes knowing by then something wasn’t right with the lead Alfa. We weren’t the only ones to notice. I had a protest written at the close of the race but I needn’t have bothered as another team beat me to it. When the SCCA officials checked the Alfa’s fuel capacity it was much larger than regulations allowed. The Alfa was disqualified. The next day the official results were posted. BRE had won the race and the 2.5 TransAm championship for Datsun/Nissan!

You may wonder how I can remember such details, like how long the Alfas could run on a tank, almost 5 decades ago. The experiences of the BRE team were captured in detail that season (and the next two years) by talented author, Sylvia Wilkinson, in her book “The Stainless Steel Carrot”.  We first came to know Sylvia when she approached me at the beginning of the season about being, what is now called, an “embedded journalist”. She wanted to write a book about an up-and-coming race car driver and had astutely recognized John as a good candidate. It’s not possible to adequately describe how brilliant this book is in capturing the activities and thoughts and feelings of the team as we worked our way through the entire season to become champions.

The chapter on the Laguna race exposes how some team members thought I had pulled in John to fuel early because they thought I didn’t have enough confidence in his driving when it was exactly the opposite. I knew John was fast enough to again pass Kwech but I also knew Kwech would probably take him out again and there simply wasn’t enough time left to gamble. The book also shares how a team member got on John for not being more upset with Kwech continually hitting him (car-to-car), but if you know John you know he’d never lose control of the situation. Sylvia also heartbreakingly describes what it was like for John to not win the race on the track.

Anyone who’s heard me talk about this race knows how emotional I get when I feel for how John was robbed of his rightful place on the podium, being handed the trophy, kissing the girl, shaking Mr. K’s hand, waving to the cheering crowd and the public acknowledgement of winning the Trans-Am 2.5 Championship in his first year with the Datsun 510. The reaction of Alfa fans was much worse. I understand it in the moment when most had no idea what had really occurred but there’s no excuse for it in the years past.

I will leave you with the following excerpts from Sylvia’s book below. (note: The second, and final, printing of the book is now sold out except for two copies we have available on our website plus a few copies we offer that are personally signed by Sylvia, John, myself and 7 other BRE team members, two who are now deceased).