Concours d’LeMons is the flipside of that other Concours

When it comes to classic cars and the people who love them, the annual Concours d’Elegance at Pebble Beach draws la crème de la crème.

Twenty miles inland, the Concours d’LeMons draws la crème de la nondairy creamer.

At Pebble Beach, ladies in floppy hats and gents in blue blazers glide along in gleaming Duesenbergs. At the Concours d’LeMons, women in baseball caps and guys in T-shirts squeeze yet another mile or two out of their battered Dusters.

“We’re looking for terrible cars that would be shunned off the field at any other Monterey venue,” said Jay Lamm, one of the brains behind the event and a LeMons judge who says he is eager to be persuaded with gifts of booze, barbeque or, for the less imaginative, an infusion of cash.

“Why hide it?” he asked.

LeMons’, of course, is lemons, Frenchified.

Lamm, a longtime automotive journalist, also runs a series of competitions called “24 hours of LeMons” — a 500-mile race to the bottom for clunkers and junkers that cost less than $500.

While the Concours d’Elegance raises $1 million for charity and takes place on the blindingly green 18th fairway at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, LeMons does not indulge in public philanthropy. Its participants gather in a county park; catering consists of a pizza stand.

Lamm might exaggerate the low-grade quality of entries in LeMons, but not by much. If Pebble Beach is a feather pillow, LeMons is a whoopee cushion.

Beneath the stately oaks at Toro Park, Rod and Cindy Dahlgren of Napa displayed a couple of Trabants, a product of the former East Germany and a hardy perennial on Internet worst-car lists.

When rodents developed a taste for the mix of resin and cotton waste that formed the Trabant’s body, automakers had an instant fix, according to automotive lore.

“No problem!” Cindy Dahlgren said. “They added DDT.”

Consumers waited up to 15 years for the 26-horsepower car that Alan Galbraith, LeMons’ chief organizer, described as “a worse ecological disaster than the Exxon Valdez.”

That might be an overstatement, but hyperbole is tough to avoid during Monterey Car Week.

Collectors from around the world converge on the Monterey Peninsula and spend millions at auction on the automotive equivalents of Cleopatra’s barge. Celebrities like Jay Leno show off their pride and joy — his collection includes 22 Corvettes — and the bubbly flows as if from an uncapped well.

At the LeMons on Saturday, Lamm and veteran racer Dick McClure, a fellow judge, wore Panama hats and plastic leis as they inspected more than 90 entries. Congratulating the owner of a banged-up Fiat on the dullness of its finish, they learned he had generously applied a “salt rub” to the body.

Like ancients appeasing the gods with burnt offerings, competitors for “Worst in Show” set bottles of beer and half-empty bags of Cheetos on their hoods.

But the judges weren’t pushovers. Offered a salami appetizer, Lamm turned up his nose.

“Dude, that’s not a salami!” he said. “It’s a Slim Jim.”

As with the Bugattis and Lamborghinis of Pebble Beach, many LeMons entries had fascinating provenances.

Robert Talbott, a Carmel men’s clothier and winemaker, showed a vintage VW bus with three black bear vertebrae strung over the rear-view mirror. In a Wyoming blizzard, the bear had somehow gotten trapped in the hulk and died as he tucked into a cache of oats that was stored there. Chunks of back seat are scooped out, supposedly the work of a desperate bear’s jaws.

“It’s not a tall tale,” Talbott said. “I’m the one who got those doors open, and what was left of the bear was still there.”’

The LeMons drivers love their rides, but most don’t appear to be overly serious about them.

Jazz trombonist Joe Escobar restored a ’74 Pinto and topped off his work with a vanity license plate — KABBOOM.

And Ken Mitchell, a San Francisco printer, displayed a review of his Renault Le Car claiming it would crumple on hitting anything “larger than a croissant.”

“But you’d be surprised how many thumbs-up I get when people pass me,” he said. “Thumbs-up or laughs — mostly laughs.”

steve.chawkins@latimes.com