A Car Show Comedy
You go to the Monterey Peninsula expecting to find fantastic, rare and unbelievable cars for as far as the eye can see. On that score the place never disappoints. This year, though, I also did something different – I visited the infamous Concours d’ Lemons. I’ve been to the Little Car Show on Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove, and it’s a really fun, eclectic little venue. The d’ Lemons, however, is on a whole other level they not only don’t apologize for, but toot their horn about. Goofy, indignant, humble, rye, satiric, sarcastic – there are no rules and certainly, no limits. Actually, there are a couple rules – bribing judges is de rigueur and your car must at least run, if only for a couple feet.
The venue is the front lawn on the modest grounds of Seaside’s City Hall. About 80 cars brave this satire of concours events, staging themselves for the inevitable ridicule and unbridled laughter attendees and fellow entrants shower upon them. It’s a crash course in crash unworthiness, a tour d’force in what not to do when building or maintaining or customizing a car. You should know what’s coming when they brag they’re “Celebrating the oddball, mundane, and truly awful of the automotive world.”
Alan Galbraith, d’ Lemons “Head Gasket”, claimed (as he does every year) the show a great success, “This is our biggest and dumbest show yet. The cars are truly terrible and everyone is having a great time at the show.” A couple of Frenchmen serve breakfasts of baguettes and champagne to judges in an effort to get their French disaster on the podium. It doesn’t work, but it does gain extra attention for the cars on either side of them, who win the ‘Unmitigated Gaul’, the ‘Slightly Better Than a Go-Kart’, and the ‘Sight For Sour Eyes’ trophies. Their Deux Chevaux (Two Horses, literally translated) is simply too nice.
There are also examples of ill-fated attempts to build adventurous new cars, like the 1975 Bricklin. This is a really nice example of a car whose chief dreamer just ran out of money.
There are ‘American Rust Belt’ awards for GM, Ford, and Other – whatever that means. There’s a Mercury Cyclone with so much patina it looks like a modern art painting. The ‘Worst of Show’ winner is an essentially undrivable VW chassis striped of its body and retrofitted with a merry-go-round horse with cable reins to control direction. It’s an absolute mess.
The ‘Needlessly Complex Italian’ trophy goes to a little Autobianchi Bianchina that also happened to be at the Little Car Show the day before. Pretty little car actually, but the Numnutz who drives barely fits in it.
Around the corner of the grounds from these spectacles is the Presidential Corvair Stretch Limousine, created as a sort of tribute (I guess) to Ralph ‘Vader’ Nader. Complete with empty beer cans in the back and a coat of dust so thick the windshield needs a swift circle cleared to see out, it wins the ‘Best Back Seat’ award. It’s stated home is, appropriately, Washington, DC.
The ‘American Rust Belt Junk – Ford’ winner ends up being a car I owned for awhile – the 1980 Ford Fiesta from another Oaklandite, Tyler Gange. Dare I say I actually kind of enjoyed driving this little car around back in the day? Anyway, Tyler has tricked it out a bit. It looks almost track-ready.
In one of my favorite categories, a 1967 Honda Sport 800 is named the ‘Soul Sucking Japanese Appliance’ winner. This mini-monstrosity is typical early-Japanese automotive fair – too small, too underpowered, too bizarre for muscle-bound American tastes of the ’60s. What, are you kidding!?
Speaking of rust buckets, here’s one we barely believed could still motate down the road – the rust-laden ‘Driving on a Prayer’ winner, a 1969 Toyota Corolla Station Wagon in all it’s glorious white on rust.
The wonderment continues with the ‘Sight for Sour Eyes’ awarded to a 2005 Mini Cooper that’s been remade into an alternate reality hippie wagon of memorabilia. And yes, it’s owner completely looks the part of a somewhat incensed left-winger who hasn’t yet entirely gotten his way. On the podium one of our emcees asks our intrepid owner what he’s been smoking. The answer is appropriate – “Huh?”
The ridiculousness continues with a VW Bus whose owner barges across the awards podium somehow believing he has won something. That’s a complete surprise to Alan and his co-emcee, who finally bribe him to move along by giving him a consolation prize of Griot’s car care products that, as the pictures show, he already has! Wow. Now THAT’S worthy of an ‘Unmitigated Gaul’ award.
More down to earth, we have a farmer, his wife and his trusty ’60 Studebaker Champ pickup that’s been wandering his farm for the past 60 years. He even drove it to the show, more than we can say about the roadworthiness of some of these cars. His wife is here, she’s just seated off the right front fender next to the gunnysack….
When Will Hughes cruised onto the podium in his 1981 Chrysler Imperial, I immediately wanted to record the humorous, if marginally sober, monologue he launched into while standing through the sunroof of his one-time American luxo-mobile. He apparently has gained the right to some latitude by being an annual participant since the beginnings of d’ Lemons. Hence, I guess, his ‘Participation’ award. He was funny and his inebriation made it more so. And his car – well, it’s a classic crappy piece of ’80s American manufacturing.
Finally, we come to the ‘Worst of Show’ award that went to this totally crazy, absolutely unsafe VW horse. Steering is from cable reins around the horse’s neck. It pulls wheelies simply by adjusting your body weight in the wrong place. Yes, those booze bottles near the front wheel are not there by accident. You’ll need to take another shot of courage to pilot this thing.
So, if you consider visiting Monterey during Car Week, don’t miss this event. It’s also grown to other locations around the country. It’s fun, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, and free. As organizer Alan Galbraith says, you might even get “less than you paid for” and go away happy about it.
