The auto industry has made some pretty cool cars in its 100-plus years: the Jag XKE, Ferrari GTO and the ’57 Chevy. But occasionally the auto industry eats some bad chicken salad and hurls. It is the latter that is celebrated at the annual Concours d’LeMons.
Every year for the past six years, The LeMons has forced itself upon the weeklong celebration of wheeled beauty that is Pebble Beach with an insistent affront to good taste and elegant design. Originally titled the Concours d’Ignorance, it is the brain child — or brain flatulence — of California hot-rod entrepreneur Alan Galbraith. The rest of the year, Galbraith hosts entirely legitimate drag-racing and rod shows under his Billetproof banner. But three times a year in what has grown now to three cities, he hosts the Concours d’LeMons, the antichrist of cardom.
Why? Because where else could a proud owner show off a pristine (or ratty) Vega wagon, Pontiac Aztec or Reliant Robin? Nowhere, that’s where. LeMons indulges its attendees and their love of the mistakes of an industry, the hiccups of product planning, the cases where no one wanted to tell Ron Zarrella that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. It is an automotive freak show, but done with good humor. If we can’t laugh at ourselves, let’s at least laugh at our cars.
A couple cars over was the Nash Metropolitan of Wild Bill Hill, proprietor of Wild Bill’s Tattoo (“Voted ‘Best Tattoo Studio’ 10 years in a row by the readers of Sacramento Magazine”). Hill’s Nash had some good hot-rod details, like a grinning devil head on the hood, but the best thing was the propane-fueled flame thrower that operated off the back end. Hill had attached some hot dogs on a fork and was flamboyantly flaming them every couple of minutes to the thrill of the crowd. Then he’d toast a bun and eat them.
“I have a couple cars that do this,” said Hill.
He showed us some of his other rides, from a polished-aluminum Panoz Esperante to a custom motorcycle with a side car that could carry another custom motorcycle.
Up a couple spaces from Hill was the massive Galaxia de la Baja of Rene Aguirre and Krysten Laine. It’s a 1964 Ford Galaxie set up for off-road racing.
“How could I say no when their entry photo showed the car upside down in a ditch,” asked Galbraith.
The rig has competed in the NORRA Mexican 1000 and is fully sorted out for desert-stomping, with giant Fox shocks, BFGoodrich tires and full roll cage. What’s it like to race it full tilt in the desert?
“It’s kind of hair ball but it’s fun,” said Aguirre.
Richard Julian brought a 1956 Ford Stake Truck and converted the flat bed into a Tiki party from which he surveyed the scene.
Drag racer Lowell Burton made a grand entrance when he brap-brap-brapped his homemade dragster “Trouble” onto the field. This time it had a Hudson 308 flathead straight-six for power, but it usually has twice that output.
“I’m a double-motor guy,” Burton said. Yes, in the tradition of the late-’50s early ’60s NHRA nitro ban, Burton has become adept at using two gas engines in a single dragster.
“It’s very important that you synch them up,” he told us.
We want to visit his shop.
There was an artist on hand, too. Peter Hiller takes extreme close-ups of car bodies to display their aging patina and had several large prints on hand. It is really cool stuff.
“My eye is drawn to the color and texture,” he said. “These old cars were a perfect source for that.”
If there was an oddity among all these odd cars, it was the presence of so many perfectly nice non-LeMons-looking rides: an unrestored but fully preserved ’65 Corvette, several cool Mercedes including a 190 wagon made by Binz Karosserie that had reportedly won an award at an earlier “legitimate” car show, a perfect 1953 Hudson Hornet, a Nash Rambler and Statesman, and a 1971 lifted Jeep Wagoneer Custom Deluxe with hand-painted wood trim where the original decal wood had been. Of these and others like them, we heard many commenters saying something along the lines of, “This doesn’t belong here.” Does it?
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Or maybe people shouldn’t take LeMons so seriously. They’re only cars, after all, and most of them are still terrible.
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