by Wallace Wyss –
When Pebble Beach announced that an unrestored car had taken first place at their vaunted concours (1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports shown by Fritz Burkard of The Pearl Collection), I am sure half a dozen car restorers in the crowd had to reach for their heart pills.
Because, in essence, what Pebble was saying, is that “History is more important than how good the paint, body and upholstery are.” So all those judges who in the past were attuned to the best paint job, or the best upholstery, now are going to have their targeting apparatus realigned to look for faithful preservation of history.
I agree with it. Not that I ever fully restored a car–my rule was to keep it running, don’t take out the engine and scatter parts, just remove what you have to in order to paint it. A Street Resto, y’might say.
And admittedly I customized my Ferrari 365GTC/4 a tad, putting wood on the console, having a Nardi steering wheel and even brass plating the wingnuts on the two rows of six Weber dual throat sidedrafts. Why I like the idea that more unrestored cars will be vying for this prize next year is that the restorers will try harder to restore some piece of equipment that may have been hand made for the car. Say some former car owner who also was a flyer had a special radiator ornament made, etc. to remind him of his wartime fighter. The car is then linked with the history of its owner.
One of my favorite Rolls is the Phantom V of this British prince who had most of the car high gloss black but one portion flat black, introducing flat black as a legitimate color scheme coupled with the gloss.
So I consider the judges voting for the best unrestored car to top them all–a mature, more bringing a respect for ownership than those owners who had that area stripped down to bare metal and repainted. No less an expert than Phil Hill, who used to own a restoration shop in Santa Monica, told me that one thing that was lost on a lot of pre-war cars was the use of several colors of paint being used on the same car at the same time.
Today many restorers just strip the paint, and paint the car one color, losing the drama that resulted from several variations on the base color on one car at one time.
I recently saw a pink Ruxton at the Petersen Museum and it had a base color of dark pink but then different darker versions of pink here and there, so I thought “There’s one Phil Hill would have approved of.”
Let us know what you think in the Comments.
THE AUTHOR: Wallace Wyss is a fine artist specializing in painting canvases of rare cars. Galleries can reach him at malibucarart2@gmail.com
Photos compliments of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
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