Monterey Classic Car Week 2012

It's been a while since I've posted on the blog, mainly because my day job keeps my creative needs met most of the time. But after getting back from Monterey I had 8,000 photos that wdre begging to be shared. Some ended up on our Facebook page and others will appear in Dusty's exceptional Driven World Magazine - which continues to amaze me every month with even higher levels of work from all involved. Here are links to the rest. I whittled them down a bit by tossing out all of the blurry ones, and broke them up into hopefully bitesize chunks for you. I still need to do the final track album and a highlight album that will likely be around 200 of my favorite shots from that week, but for now...

By the way, Monterey is impossible to capture in words or pictures. Even video doesn't do it justice. The electricity you feel up there just driving around the peninsula is incredible. Even without events like McCall's, Concorso, Quail, the Historics and Pebble, the cars you can see driving around, parked at Denny's, filling up at Rotten Robbie's...are nicer than the cars at most museums or exotic car dealerships. Fortunately for us, we also got to add the Jet Center, Laguna Seca, 17-Mile Drive, the Lodge at Pebble Beach, Bixby Bridge and Scott's Valley to the list of beautiful backdrops for our photos too. So click through and enjoy a whirlwind visit to Monterey for Classic Car Week.

Monterey 2012 - McCall's Motorworks Revival

Monterey 2012 - Canepa Design

Monterey 2012 - Historics: Paddock Walk

Monterey 2012 - Pebble Beach Tour d'Elegance

Monterey 2012 - RM and Gooding

Monterey 2012 - Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance

Monterey 2012 - Misc. Sights

2011 Pebble Beach Tour d'Elegance

Photos from 2011 Pebble Beach Tour d'Elegance

These ain't no trailer queens.

While you might expect that a car that cost more than a million dollars to restore beyond its original glory would be something you'd keep in a sealed zip-lock freezer bag in the guarded basement of a museum, the vast majority of the entries in the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance are actually driven on the street. Or at least they are driven once before the big show. On the Thursday before the concours--which leaves three days to repair dings, paint chips and mud splats--about 170 of the 210 or so cars entered in the concours roared off from the Equestrain Center above the Lodge and circumnavigated the Monterey Peninsula--squashed bugs on the windshield and all--to the delight of cheering fans waiting in beach chairs all along the route.

Thursday's circuit began with a short stretch of 17-Mile Drive and headed up into the hills of Monterey, through Tehama preserve, down Carmel Valley Road and then shot off south to Big Sur and back. A lunch stop in downtown Carmel provided plenty of opportunity for the public to ogle the parked cars while their drivers had lunch.

Surprisingly, almost all the cars made the trip without problems. One of the most difficult parts of the tour are the uphill sections, not because the cars don't have enough power to get up them, but because they tend to travel in a sort of conga line nose-to-tail. When one car without a synchromesh first gear has to stop to downshift, the whole line has to stop, except those quick enough to figure out what's going on and steer around the halted caravan, preserving their momentum. Stopping and starting again and again on a steep hill is not easy on these old drivetrains, and you could smell burned clutches when it happened.

But as the cars spread out on the much flatter Highway 1 to Big Sur and back, the great beasts could open up a little and roar along as their original builders intended them to.

The cars are all in private garages now having the bugs surgically removed from the windshields. Come Sunday, you won't know they ever left the showroom.

Read more: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20110819/CARNEWS/110819853#ixzz1Z1vUUQ1n