A Weekend to Remember

They’ve painted them in oil on canvas, buried them nose-first in the dirt alongside a highway, covered them with tiles, chopped them up, trimmed them down and customized them in every way imaginable, all in the name of art.

But for the purist, the most perfect form of car art is a pre-1950s vehicle restored to--sometimes preserved in--its original glory, displayed the way craftspeople at Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, Daimler-Benz (when there was one), Ford, Franklin, Ferrari and scores of other auto makers intended them to be seen.

The main event for these classic cars, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, will be staged Sunday on the 18th fairway of the Pebble Beach Golf Links, capping a three-day extravaganza known to automotive aficionados as “The Weekend.”

It is the 51st running of the Concours--that’s French for a gathering or coming together--and the weekend is expected, as usual, to draw upward of 100,000 car buffs from around the world. (If you didn’t reserve a hotel room or campground space months ago, a casual drive up for the weekend is not a good idea.)

The Concours remains the big attraction, with tickets sold only in advance at a cool $100 a person, thank you, with proceeds to benefit local charities. But the weekend also offers an automotive abundance that includes:

* Vintage car races at the famed Laguna Seca Raceway (recently renamed the Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca in a multimillion-dollar corporate sponsorship deal).

* A quartet of car auctions, with everything from tarnished racing trophies to million-dollar classics on the block.

* The Concorso Italiano (that’s Italian for concours), which takes place Friday in Carmel Valley just south of Monterey and is the largest annual gathering of Italian cars outside of a Roman traffic jam.

* Celebrations of Ford Motor Co.’s century in auto racing and the 100th anniversary of the Mercedes-Benz brand.

* The 40th anniversary of Phil Hill’s 1961 Formula One world championship--the first such title captured by an American and a feat repeated by only one other American driver, Mario Andretti.

In addition, General Motors Corp.’s Cadillac division will use the Pebble Beach weekend for the unveiling of its new CTS--the replacement for the entry-level Catera and the first Caddy to use the sharp-edged “Art & Science” design theme launched with the Evoq concept car in 1999.

Irvine-based Meguiar’s Inc., which makes auto waxes and polishes favored by many in the classic and collector car world, will be there celebrating its 100th birthday by sponsoring a new “preservation” class for unrestored pre-World War I vehicles.

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Judges in that class are looking for cars that have been preserved in original condition, with no new parts other than tires, hoses and other rubber components.

For Richard Nolind and the crew from the Nethercutt Collection auto museum in Sylmar, this year’s Pebble Beach weekend started in January when Nolind’s boss, car collector and museum benefactor J.B. Nethercutt, selected a 1911 Franklin limousine and a 1913 Mercedes-Benz touring phaeton as entries in a competition in which he has taken part since 1957--when the first car he restored won coveted “Best of Show” honors.

Nethercutt, who considers automobiles “functional fine art that is part of the history of the progress of America,” has won six Best of Show trophies at Pebble, more than anyone else in the history of the event, whose contestants enter by invitation only.

This year he has placed the brass-trimmed Franklin in the preservation class and the rare, custom-bodied phaeton in the early Mercedes-Benz class.

The concept of a well-preserved car is fairly easy to understand, but a restoration is a difficult concept that can vary widely.

At Pebble, it has come to mean perfection, and Nethercutt, whose team produces some of the most renowned restorations of modern times, spends years and thousands of dollars researching the history of a vehicle before starting the laborious process of putting it back into the condition its maker intended.

A concours-perfect restoration means that everything, down to the nuts, screws and gaskets, must be identical in appearance to what was used in the original manufacture.

Restorers can--and do--use modern materials and techniques, but the end result must achieve antique-auto authenticity on the outside.

The Nethercutt Mercedes--now a gleaming construct of polished and painted metal, oiled leather and lacquered wood--was little more than a pile of parts in February as restorers at the private, nonprofit museum worked to re-create its skin by dissecting its skeleton.

The car, which the Nethercutt Collection had acquired in the early 1980s, was made in the fashion of its day: A steel chassis with engine and running gear was built by Mercedes-Benz in Germany and delivered to the coach builder of the customer’s choice, in this case the French firm of Henri Labourdette. There, a wooden frame was constructed and a hand-formed steel skin fabricated and attached to it.

Through the years, as with most elderly vehicles, the wood deteriorated in places, some of the steel rusted, nickel plating pitted and rubber and leather deteriorated.

To complicate the restoration, the body had been altered and the restorers could not find a picture of the vehicle in its original state.

Although Nethercutt and Nolind were able to document the car’s history from 1913 to 1930 and from 1975 to the present, their researchers found no clues to its whereabouts or ownership during the missing 45-year stretch, when the alteration was made.

“We sent people to Paris and Germany to research the car, and we got ahold of the factory build sheets” that document every component of the vehicle, said Nolind, president of the Nethercutt Collection. “But we never were able to find a picture of it.”

The final body style selected by the Nethercutt restoration team is a touring coach with lower sides and more gracefully arching fenders than the car had when Nethercutt acquired it--a shape based on the opinions of a worldwide group of Mercedes experts and the recollections of a man in Paris who had once seen the car.

After the final shape had been determined, the car was dismantled and rebuilt by a team of restorers who spent hundreds of hours replacing broken and worn pieces of the body’s wooden frame and reshaping some parts to fit the new “original” design.

They also rebuilt the 12-valve, four-cylinder engine; made upholstery and a new top; fashioned new sheet-metal body parts and fancy wooden cabinetry (those were the days when a decanter of brandy and a quartet of cut-crystal snifters often accompanied passengers); and designed and applied the paint work.

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Nolind won’t talk about how much it cost to restore the Mercedes, but a car like that could easily sell for several million dollars at one of the classic auto auctions that have become part of the Pebble weekend.

Indeed, though most of the car buffs who crowd the coast from Carmel to Santa Cruz during Pebble Beach weekend are there to look, quite a few come to buy.

In each of the last few years, more than $40 million has changed hands at auction, often in intense bidding wars that can plunge a tent full of boisterous spectators into silence and then bring them to their feet in tumultuous ovation when the winner is finally declared.

Watching someone spend $5.6 million for a used car--no matter how rare, as happened last year with a 1966 Ferrari 330 P3 at Christie’s auction at Pebble Beach--can be as dramatic a spectator sport as any football bowl game.

There are four auctions to choose from this year, each targeting different clientele.

New for 2001 is the Russo & Steele auction of American muscle cars, to be held Saturday at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Monterey. Although most of the weekend is given over to marques such as Allard, Delahaye and Porsche, this is a Detroit-centric event focusing on names such as GTO, Super Sport, Boss Mustang, Hemi, 409 and Trans Am. Bidding will start at 7 p.m., but the cars will be on display at the hotel all day Friday and Saturday.

RM Auctions of Beverly Hills will hold its annual Monterey Sports Car Auction on Friday and Saturday evenings at the Doubletree Hotel near the Monterey Wharf. RM typically has more vehicles on the block than any other venue for the weekend, and all will be on display in the hotel courtyard.

Bonhams & Brooks Auctions, which specializes in automobilia and touring and racing cars, is a one-day affair starting at 3 p.m. Saturday with some 500 automobilia items--from car art to historic racing trophies--and continuing at 6 p.m with its auto event, featuring more than 100 cars. Admission is by catalog, which admits two at $35 per copy.

The weekend concludes with the final gavel at Christie’s International Motor Cars auction on Sunday, after the Concours itself. The auction firm immodestly but accurately calls the event “Christie’s Exceptional Motor Cars in Monterey” and kicks off bidding in a gleaming white tent at the Pebble Beach Equestrian Center at 6 p.m. Admission is by catalog--the $40 book can be purchased at the door and gets two through the tent flap.

Only 80 cars are scheduled to go on the block, but they are among the choicest to come to the auction scene during the year. That cachet typically attracts a big international crowd; 3,000 attended last year.

Top attractions at Christie’s this weekend will be the oldest known Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, a 1907 limousine, expected to fetch in the neighborhood of $1 million, and a 1932 Alfa Romeo P3, a single-seat racer built for the Alfa racing team managed in those days by a mechanic named Enzo Ferrari (who later got tired of Alfas and decided to build his own cars). Estimate on the Alfa: $1.8 million to $2.2 million.

At those prices, who can argue that this isn’t car art of the highest stature?

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Times staff writer John O’Dell covers autos for Highway 1 and the Business section. He can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.