Pebble Beach 2016: Concorso Italiano brings out the best of Ferrari, Fiat, Maserati and more
For a single day each year the Black Horse Golf Course in Seaside, Calif., turns Italian, and allows its gorgeous greens and fairways to be dotted with the bright reds, yellows, oranges and blues of Italian automotive art.
More than 1,000 vehicles drove in for this year’s Concorso Italiano. Under cloudy skies that smelled faintly of smoke from the still-burning Soberanes fire, arranged by marque, they lined the hilly golf course.
The automobile finery ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, though in which direction depended upon individual taste.
In one long line were matching Alfa Romeo 1600 Duetto Spiders, the car made famous in the 1968 movie “The Graduate.” In another gathering were Ferraris of every imaginable hue. Over the hill, on a facing fairway, were dozens of pristine Lamborghinis.
Some of the vehicles brought to the Concorso were older, collectible cars, some restored to perfection, others showing the honored patina of careful preservation.
Brooke Cobb was sitting under a broad straw hat behind her 1957 Fiat 1200 Transformabile — Italian for “convertible.” The aqua-green drop top was all original, and it was for sale, with a $50,000 starting bid on Ebay, Cobb said.
When told it was quite a rare vehicle, Cobb, a collector from Santa Cruz, said, “I know. I own four of them.”
Across the lawn, auto designer Louis de Fabribeckers was promoting a brand-new Alfa Romeo Disco Volante Spyder, a handmade convertible roadster custom made by the Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Touring.
De Fabribeckers said the sleek, aluminum-bodied car was the only one in the world, built for a European buyer who had seen a similar Touring-made Alfa and wanted the convertible version.
Two others are in production, De Fabribeckers said, and a total of five have been sold. But only seven will be made, in order to keep them exclusive.
How expensive are they? The man from Touring would not say.
“The price is obviously quite high, but it’s like buying a piece of sculpture, or a painting,” he said. “You don’t want to tell the public how much you pay.”
At a Fiat-sponsored event that kicked off the daylong Concorso, company executives were quite happy to discuss price. Touting a new relationship between the famed Bondurant driving school and Fiat’s new 124 Spider sports car, Fiat executives reminded their visitors several times of the base price of less than $25,000, what they call “the most affordable turbo-charged sports car in America.”
Taking the stage to announce that the school he founded would now use the Fiat 124 Spider Abarth model on its tracks — new Abarth owners, in fact, win a free day of track time when they buy one — Bondurant said, “We love that Spider!”
It wasn’t all cars. High upon a bluff, far from the Lambos and DeTomaso Panteras, a small collection of motorcycles had been rolled out onto the green, there to compete in several categories for small Italian-made motorcycles and scooters.
Joe Deason of San Francisco had brought four Vespas from his Bello Moto service shop — one each to represent the key Vespa decades of 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970. Beside him was a non-Bello Moto Vespa from 1979, belonging to Bakersfield collector David Coffey, to represent the 1980s.
Deason said he was in the scooter business because he loved it, not because he expected it to be profitable.
“You do it for the passion,” he said. “You don’t make any money.”
