No. 1: Why the transport lot
Monterey, California. [Year of the Dawn Patrol morning described below; add your own photographs from the lot.]
It was a 5:00am wake up call that set our final day in Monterey into motion. We made it into the car quickly, starting the Corvette Z07 in stealth mode so as not to wake the neighbourhood, and drove to Dawn Patrol, the one event on most enthusiasts' bucket lists that costs nothing to attend. It is the only chance to see the cars entered in the Pebble Beach Concours driven onto the field rather than parked on it, and with the fog sitting on the coast behind the 18th green, it is a sight to behold.
At 6:22am the first car, piloted by Donald Osborne, rolled onto the grass. Dawn Patrol had officially begun, and the noise of carburetted engines did not stop until every car in the Concours d'Elegance had found its place on the golf course.
Here is what most people watching Dawn Patrol miss. Every one of those cars got to the edge of the field the same way: in an enclosed trailer, unloaded in the dark by a driver who has done it a hundred times, checked over by a mechanic with a flashlight, and pushed to a staging line by hand. The lawn is the performance. The lot is the work.
The first year I wrote about Monterey, the number that stayed with me was not the $45.7 million Mecum took across its sale, or the 600 cars it ran through the tent. It was the 80 or so enclosed trailers parked in rows behind it, each one carrying somebody's dream car, each one driven by somebody who would get it home again. Everyone writes about the hammer. Nobody writes about the liftgate.
So this column will. Each entry comes from a single event, written from the lot, the paddock or the staging lane, with the people who move the cars named where they want to be named. Expect timestamps, trailer counts, the state of the gravel and the occasional argument about tie-down straps. Expect the cars too, obviously. They just arrive from the back this time.
Coming up
- No. 2: The Quail staging lane, Monterey 2026. [Your notes and photographs from August 14.]
- No. 3: Rétromobile, Paris, February 2027. How the cars get into the halls at Porte de Versailles through service entrances built for delivery vans.