Gooding’s Auctions are the on-property auction house featuring cars one only dreams about. On Saturday, I wandered down on the empty 18th fairway to check out the condition of the grass in drought stricken California and I was glad to see that the drought hadn’t affected the show field.

 

  Later I stopped into the party at the McLaren setup and enjoyed a little lox on a bagel. What, lox and bagel on the 18th fairway? Not a Russ & Daughters on Houston St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Culture has finally reached the other coast!

 

    Sunday I was on the show field at 5am and the crowd had already started to gather to watch the cars being driven on to the fairway. This year two of the greatest British race drivers ever, Sir Stirling Moss and Sir Jackie Stewart were guests of the event. And, as usual, Jay Leno was out wandering about too.

 

   Since it was Maserati’s 100^th birthday, it was only appropriate that some of the cars that made history would be on the grass. One Maserati brought from Argentina was the car that the late, great Juan Manuel Fangio drove during his rein as World Driving Champion back in the ’50s. For the past five years, motorcycles have been a featured class at the event. This year the Concours celebrated the motorcycles of Eastern Europe.

 

 The crowd continued to get bigger and bigger and by the time 10am rolled around when they let the paying guests in, it was by far the hugest crowd I had ever seen at a Pebble Beach Concours. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so look at my photos and save me from writing.