Charles Dickens, my favorite english-language wordsmith said it best in the opening of one of his finest works, 'A Tale of two Cities': It was the Best of Times, it was the worst of times.
His wisdom certainly applies to this year's automotive extravaganza on the Monterey Peninsula. Some of the events surpassed their past editions on all levels, others were little more than tired, burned out rehashes of every past iteration. In addition, as most of you probably heard, the inconsistent and unpredictable weather along California's central coast played its part with sizzling heat a couple of weeks prior to the start of the week, with one particularly large wildfire South of the Monterey Peninsula burning out of control, consuming about 76,000 acres, burning a number of homes and causing pollution and smoke so thick that one Monterey city council woman in a moment of panic proposed cancelling Car Week altogether.........an ill-advised and odious notion that was promptly voted down.
We were all actually very lucky in that the prevailing winds shifted and blew the smoke and ash inland, in a southeasterly direction with minimal effect on the proceedings at Laguna Seca or Pebble Beach as well as the other venues. Currently it is hoped that the fire will be fully contained in mid-September.
The only actual last-minute change in schedule wich had a measurable impact on the event was the significant shortening of Thursday's Tour d'Elegance from its usual 55 miles to a much shorter drive of about 27 miles on a hastily rerouted loop, but the largest change to the rules was that no points would be awarded to the participants, leading many to assume that noone would take part in the drive since there was no point in 'abusing' the cars if one didn't gain a point advantage by going on the drive - nevertheless, quite a few cars were waved off at about 8:00 AM on Thursday in a show of true enthusiasm and celebration.
Traffic problems at some of the events were biblical, for instance, getting out of the Werks Reunion and returning to our house in Carmel, a distance of about 8 miles took almost an hour midday Friday, since other events were being held further East on Carmel Valley Road.
But it all went off, and I and most of my aquaintances who braved it all to attend the week were glad we did. Saw and heard some incredible cars, saw, met and talked to great people, filed away some unforgettable memories and all in all, had a wonderful time. I filled 4 64 and 2 32 GB cards with two cameras, and have finally separated the wheat from the chaff and arrived at the point where I can start to present the promised chronicle of the best vintage / collector car / car guy week anywhere in the western hemisphere.
This will be my largest one-time contribution to the ESReg yet. I have seperated a number of the best images to be sent to John Dilger for potential inclusion in the autumn issue of the ESSES to ensure there are no duplications and have gotten a good start on processing the remainder for posting in this thread. I trust you will all understand that this is a major voluntary undertaking on my part and 'something has to give' as it were, and that something will have to be the amount of my usual windy commentary..........I simply don't have the time because work involved in post-processing and posting the total number of images I intend to present will take much longer than my previous efforts.........however, if there are burning questions about specific cars, I promise to try to provide the information as best I can.
Thanks for looking, and let me assure you that I will do whatever necessary to post one event per day - but no guarantees.
John Z. Goriup
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The first event on Saturday, Aug.13 was the Pre-Reunion at Laguna Seca..........one of my favorite events of the whole week. Much to the cridit of the much maligned SCRAMP organization, the 'Pre-Historics; as they were known for 35 years, have improved every year, including 2016. Stellar turn-out of cars, ( the featured marque this year was BMW on the occasion of the firm's centennial ), well-organized, no serious accidents and the weather held - in fact. the weather was a photographers delight since it started out overcast and on most days only turned sunny later in the day when I had gotten most of the images I wanted.
The first car I encountered after turning the corner into Canepa's pit area was the blue / yellow '62 Ferrari 250 GTO......when that is how the day and the week start, you just know it'll all be good.
Enjoy !
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