The featured makes at Hillsborough this year were Lamborghini and Buick. Organizing a show around specific makes gives the public a theme, and car club members and historians a field full of textbook specimens to study. Along with the themes there were some trends on view. One aspect from the earliest concours events (like Italy's Villa d'Este, 1929) enjoying a resurgence of popularity is that people dress up to match their cars. To be eligible for competition, a car must be at least 25 years old, but that means cars as new as 1993 can compete. Think of that; someone wearing the tee shirt and jeans they wore when washing their '93 Lotus can claim it's "period attire." On the other hand, the owners of this spectacular 1938 Buick Limited Opera Brougham will need to don outfits showing the same kind of Art Deco flair. And that may take almost as much work as polishing its acres of painted and chromed steel…
This Buick was bodied by Fernandez and Darrin, and displays designer Howard Darrin's love of swooping curves and arresting details like the rattan pattern on the rear doors. The car is owned by the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. The University's industrial design students participated in this year's show by designing a futurist Buick show car (more about that future some other time). The 1939 Century convertible below is also owned by the University, which maintains a wide-ranging collection of cars.*
The matching 1939 Roadmaster 4-door convertible below was displayed by private owners. Another trend gaining momentum is that some cars are now so valuable that they are owned by corporations or consortia that can afford to pay seven or eight-figure price tags. It's somehow a relief to encounter cars that are still maintained by the families or individuals that in some cases restored them from rusty, abandoned wrecks.
When Buick built its last wood-paneled Roadmaster Estate Wagon in 1953, most people would have laughed at the suggestion that GM's oldest car division would one day help save that corporation by becoming the most popular American car in the People's Republic of China…
But in a world where car makers once covered (and even framed) their products with the material that led to the famous boating slogan "Spend one day sailing, three days sanding and varnishing", anything may be possible.
This Buick Century convertible was one of the more restrained and understated cars of 1957, the year Virgil Exner introduced really big fins to Chrysler's Forward Look, and also the year of Mercury's science fiction Turnpike Cruiser, with its dummy radar antennae. The sunny, optimistic verve of the '57 Buick line was followed by the chrome-encrusted excess of the '58*. But this was a concours d'elegance, so there were no '58s here.
Pierce-Arrow was a maker of fine cars that represented the pinnacle of prestige from the era of Teddy Roosevelt until well into the Roaring Twenties. By the time this handsome 1934 Model 840A convertible coupe was built, Pierce-Arrow still stood for quality, but its popularity had been eclipsed by Packard as well as Cadillac. This car, built the year after Pierce ended a 5-year union with Studebaker culminating in the release of the V12 Silver Arrow* show cars at the Chicago Century of Progress, shows signature features like headlights integrated with the fenders (introduced in 1913) and the archer hood ornament. Four years after it was built, the Great Depression had reduced sales to the point that the Buffalo, New York factory stopped building cars.
The 1937 Packard Super Eight Touring Sedan meets the definition of "stately"...
Side-mounted spares and deftly applied chrome accents add to the impression of imposing dignity. The cormorant hood ornament seems far away, and it is. The inline, flathead eight is a long engine...
During the first half of the 1950s, American sportsman Briggs Cunningham contested the 24 Hours of Le Mans, first with stock and modified Cadillacs, and then with Chrysler-powered cars of his own manufacture. From 1953 to '55, he offered a touring version of his C-2 road racing cars in coupe and convertible versions called C-3, with bodywork by Vignale of Italy.
This example must be one of the first cars completed, as it was built in 1952. Fewer than 30 of these C-3 road cars were completed. Bodywork, designed by Giovanni Michelotti, resembled a scaled-up version of the bodies Vignale was building on Ferrari chassis during the early 1950s. The Cunningham C-3* was one of the featured cars in the Museum of Modern Art's 1953 show, Ten Automobiles, which also featured a Loewy Studebaker and a Porsche 356. Power was provided by a 331 cubic inch Chrysler V8.
Having been to a lifetime of car shows without ever encountering a single postwar Armstrong Siddeley, I was startled to find two of them on display. These were early versions of the 3.4 liter six cylinder Sapphire model, which competed in the British market (and almost nowhere else) with Jaguar's Mark VII and various Daimlers. These offered modern, overhead valve engines, Wilson pre-selector gearboxes, and solid workmanship with wood and leather-lined interiors.
In a burst of good humor, the Sapphire's designers updated the traditional Armstrong sphinx hood ornament with jet engines to reflect the company's aircraft industry involvement. Somewhat like Hudson in America, Armstrong Siddeley gambled on tooling up for a smaller car in the mid-1950s, the 234 and 236 line. As with Hudson's Jet, the smaller car was solidly built but suffered from ungainly styling. Lack of sales may have contributed to Armstrong's eventual closing of their car-building operation.
This Sapphire, also from 1953; features a more typical two-tone paint scheme. Production stopped with the 1960 Star Sapphire after a merger with Bristol. By that time, the engine was at 4 liter capacity, with over-square cylinder dimensions, and automatic transmission was offered. The 1961 Jaguar E-type pictured below has features that mark it as one of the first built, and that also make it a Holy Grail for Jaguar collectors. These include external bonnet release latches and a flat floor without the later depressions below the seats for driver and passenger. This meant that unlike on later cars, you had to go outside to open the hood, and that despite the adjustable steering wheel, you might never have enough knee space below the wheel. So two of what might be called "Inconvenience features" actually made the car more valuable in the long run. It's still a crazy world, and it's still a striking car…
Depressed by all this talk of escalating prices, unobtainable cars and an increasingly conglomerate-dominated hobby? Let's switch to soothing black and white photography, just like Road & Track used in 1961, and for a moment we can dream we're back in the era of four-digit car values and gas prices expressed in cents. It will be a kind of visual moment of silence for a lost world...
The trio of XK-120s shown above and below display the seductive curves and twin-cam engines that brought Jaguar an American following from their first appearance in 1949. Roadsters came first, followed by the fixed-head coupe and a drop head, a convertible with padded top and wind-up windows.
If looking at old Jags in vintage monochrome doesn't cheer you up, perhaps a visit to the parking lot will do the trick. This writer has always made a careful survey of parking lots at concours and club shows. At the old Palo Alto Concours, some intriguing cars for sale could be found there, and at Pebble Beach around thirty years ago I discovered that a spectator had driven a Bugatti T57 coupe and casually left it in the lot, separated from a beat-up Mercedes 300SL by a sea of Volvos, Toyota pickups and Camaros. That old blue Bugatti and the beat-up Benz had a lot of what today's car collectors call patina. Translation: They looked like used cars.
This Packard 110 wagon, on the other hand, is in superb shape, and seems to be happy sheltering under the shady trees that border the lot. The rear body is actually wood-framed, unlike the '53 Buick, which had a steel roof and doors. The 110 was the entry-level Packard, and featured an inline flathead six-cylinder engine. The popular, eight-cylinder 120, the car which many credited with getting Packard through the Great Depression, was just above it in the lineup.
This 1953 Mercury Monterey ragtop provided stylish transportation for the Concours organizers; they'd parked her next to the Packard for company…
All in all, a very good show, and we haven't even gotten to the Lamborghinis. Even though I was admitted to the grounds half an hour before the official opening, the Lambos fell victim to the "I'll come back later" syndrome; by the time I came back they were surrounded by a dense cloud of photographers. We're hoping for better photographic opportunities at next month's Monterey Car Weekend.
*Footnotes: These makes and models have been featured in previous postings; you'll find them in the Archives for the following dates:
1958 Buick: 8/3/16
Pierce Silver Arrow: 12/31/16
1958 Buick: 8/3/16
Pierce Silver Arrow: 12/31/16
Cunningham C-3: 4/15/17
Jaguar E-type: 8/13/17
Jaguar XK120: 7/16/17
Lotus Elite: 3/6/17 and 7/31/16
The Academy of Art University car collection was surveyed in our posting for 4/29/18.
The Academy of Art University car collection was surveyed in our posting for 4/29/18.
Photo credit: All photos by the author.
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