The Rodeo Drive Concours D’Elegance in tony Beverly Hills has been a Father’s Day fixture. To paraphrase Jay Leno, “mere millionaires can mingle with billionaires” during this car show.
You know the drill. Prep your car and have it there by 7 am. Get out your folding chairs and prepare to bake in the sun all day. Like so many formal car events it is a toss-up between a celebration of fantastic machinery and an endurance test for car lovers.
This year, organizer Bruce Meyer came up with something different. He turned the static display into a parade.
According to Meyer, noted car collector and long-time SCMer, “It was so easy and so much fun.”
He selected 60 notable cars and drivers for this “Beverly Hills Tour d’Elegance.” They lined up and paraded down Rodeo Drive. It took about 30 minutes for all the cars to pass. At the end, the cars assembled in front of City Hall, there were a few comments and a check was presented to charity.
“Compared to a formal concours, it was a breeze,” said Meyer. “Even better, by noon we were all done and finished, and people could get on with their days.”
I’ve never attended the Woodward Dream Cruise in Detroit, as it is always held on the same weekend as the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
However, SCM’s Executive Editor Jeff Sabatini (a native Michigander) recently told me it was his favorite car event, and he would much prefer to see interesting cars in motion than stroll around them sitting static on a golf course.
Of course, with a parade there is no chance to look closely at cars, or to discuss them with their owners and marque experts. There is no judging, so the skills of restoration shops are not on display.
But I mentioned this parade here as I believe it will become one more way in which people appreciate automobiles without having to be locked into an entire day. This has already happened with Cars and Coffee, where by 10 am you often have the chance to go home to mow your lawn, having already looked over a field of 200 cars.
As the costs of putting on full-blown major concours become more prohibitive, I simply offer this as another way for people to enjoy cars. A different way, and not as an immersive one. But nonetheless all of us are getting to see special cars do what they do best, which is go down the road.
Will parades like this grow in popularity or do you think this was just a one-off happening?
I look forward to your thoughts.
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Rodeo Drive Concours d’Elegance in previous years -
Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance
Street show, parade, cars&coffee…I’ll take them any day over judged concours where cars are picked apart for being “right or wrong”
Good ideas — and this is a very good one — tend to prevail. So I expect there will be many more as long is there is fuel for ICE cars.
Although I was not a huge fan of all the cars selected, it was a fun day and folks had a chance to view them for an hour or so before we opened the streets back up-
While there’s still a place in the collector car world for formal concours-type events or all-day judged car shows, I agree that something along the lines of a “parade” is a much more approachable format for most “regular” car enthusiasts. I’ll take the shorter, more relaxed, informal format of something like this or a cars & coffee any day.