Anyone who’s into Porsche 911s these days will be well aware of a California company set up in 2009 called Singer Vehicle Design. Fronted by a former rock star, Rob Dickinson, who hung up his microphone and guitar to indulge in his real passion, Singer takes old 964-generation cars and turns them into incredible, beautiful cars that blend the very best technology and engineering with old-school looks that appeal to anyone with a sense of style.
Dickinson is sitting at the far end of the golfing greens where The Quail, the car show that precedes Pebble Beach’s Concourse d’Elegance, is held. As we chat while he tries to eat some lunch, it’s obvious that the people seeing the rebuilt cars on display just a few metres away immediately become believers. They’re mesmerised. He broke his arm the night before, but he’s smiling, thanks to the obvious buzz surrounding his company’s display stand.
These are people sufficiently well-heeled to have spent $600 (Dh2,204) each on tickets to wander around a golf course looking at a static car show. These are people young in years, they’re Dickinson’s types of customers – monied and adventurous, with an obvious eye for what makes a car like a Singer-modified Porsche 911 such a joy to behold.
It’s telling that Singer has set up camp here but won’t be in attendance at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance event a couple of days later. Held last week, The Quail, which is in its 13th year, is a bit less stuffy and a bit more appealing to a younger audience, thanks to its celebratory theme of motorsport and performance-car driving, as opposed to Pebble, which can sometimes dangerously veer towards feeling like you’re in an old people’s home, so advanced is the average age of those exhibiting their automobiles.
The Quail, set up by the hotelier Sir Michael Kadoorie (owner of the ultra-luxurious Peninsula hotel chain), has come to prominence on the back of the annual Pebble Beach event, along with dozens of other sideshows that have now come to be known as Monterey Car Week. Held at the same time each year, thousands flock from all over the United States and beyond, to see, hear, perhaps touch and even purchase cars that cannot help but draw together obsessive types. This is supercar and classic-car central, and if you’re wondering what that classic car of yours is worth, much of the time its value will be set here.
Walk around The Quail or any event during Monterey Car Week, take a deep breath through your nose and smell the money. Monterey, the sleepy fishing town that lends the region its name, Carmel-by-the-Sea (even sleepier, lots of art galleries, Clint Eastwood used to be mayor), the Laguna Seca raceway, 17-Mile Drive and the Pebble Beach estate itself – they’re all part and parcel of what makes this week probably the ultimate on the world’s motoring calendar.
The day before The Quail event, the gorgeous town of Carmel is besieged by the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance – a rolling procession of indescribable mobile art made up from hundreds of the cars that will be on the lawns at Pebble Beach on Sunday. Many of them might look like over-restored prissy trailer queens, but they’re actually all entirely usable.
As the cars line up in the town centre while their occupants descended on various lunch spots, it’s an inestimable privilege to walk around cars that are worth, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars. Nobody is there to keep the crowds at bay – nobody is needed. Because the people crowding around these precious automobiles, sometimes 10 deep, only want to pay respect. If you only do one thing during Monterey Car Week, visiting Carmel to see the tour is a must.
The Tour d’Elegance starts every year at Pebble Beach and heads along the iconic Highway 1, passing through dramatic coastal scenery, dense forestry and highlands surrounding Carmel, down as far as the world-famous Big Sur, before the procession turns around and heads back for Carmel.
Seeing these incredibly beautiful, rare and valuable automobiles in use on the road where they should be is enough to soften even the hardest hearts. Who couldn’t love the sight and sound of an open, steam-powered car from the dawn of motoring? Who could fail to be moved by the lines or the symphonic wail of a mid-1960s Ferrari at full chat as it roars through forest roads, or the majesty of a 1920s Auburn or Bugatti? If you have an appreciation of beauty, art and history, this annual display is unmissable.
You might think this is little more than a bunch of obscenely rich guys – and their often much younger wives – showing off, but it’s really not like that for most. In these areas south of San Francisco, wealth garnered during the 1800s gold rush is evidently still here, but new money has come along thanks to technology – Silicon Valley isn’t far away – so it’s obvious how these people can own so much.
They continue to amass personal collections of artefacts, as evidenced by the colossal sums spent at the various auctions that take place during the week.
The interesting thing about this element is that the prices paid during Monterey Car Week are what sets the bar within the market for the rest of the world during the following 12 months. And the signs are right there for everyone to see that, while people are still unafraid to spend big money on the right cars, the market is experiencing a slight shift. Some would say this is overdue, but don’t be surprised if a “correction” is imminent.
This is confirmed when I attend a couple of lectures held after my visit to The Quail. The first, within the auction tent at Pebble Beach where Gooding and Company’s sale is gearing up, is about the classic marketplace. The panel, made up of experts from around the world, is in general agreement: things are not as crazy this year and we might see a downturn occurring in classic-car values. This, if it happens, will be a cause for celebration for many collectors and enthusiasts, who are understandably aggrieved that the cars they love are now out of reach for all but the wealthiest speculators, who are often out to make a quick and vast profit.
As I have long suspected, the demand for classic cars is more often than not, says the panel, driven by nostalgia. We like to have things that remind us of our youth, of happier and simpler times, and each generation has its favourites. My own formative years were the early 1980s, resulting in an obsession for the Ferrari 308, the Lamborghini Countach, the Porsche 930 and other astounding motor cars that used to adorn my bedroom wall. As my generation has reached a stage where there’s some reasonable level of disposable income, the inevitable has happened, and people have started to buy the things they were familiar with when they were much younger. And with increased demand comes increased prices.
There’s a feeling among experts here that certain cars will die away as their owners do, the pinch being felt particularly in the pre-war vintage market. There’s very little interest in these cars anymore, unless they’re of significant historical importance. Brands such as Bugatti and Aston Martin will always be collectible, but the mass-produced stuff will surely end up falling into neglect and we’ll see many of the cars currently in private collections falling into disrepair while care and attention is lavished upon newer metal.
The other seminar I get to attend is about the future of luxury-car design, and the panel includes the heads of design for Aston Martin, Bugatti and the coach-building company Touring Superleggera. Again, these experts are constantly scanning the market for the next big thing to keep customers satisfied and coming back for more, although they share a fear that technology will be the thing that makes a car date the most. Which, they say, influences cockpit designs for their cars that are simple and elegant, without the need for huge black screens everywhere. Personally, I’ve never seen anything wrong with analogue gauges, and the current worldwide obsession with luxury wristwatches could well make traditional dials desirable soon once more.
But it’s entirely obvious that the panel members are extremely keen for their own designs to end up being shown at Pebble Beach some day, even if that happens long after they shuffle off this mortal coil. “The cars that excite you now,” says Aston Martin’s Marek Reichman, “are not the cars that will excite the next generation. What we as designers should be doing is keeping proportions and lines correct so that beautiful and collectible cars result, which will be treasured and collected by future generations.”
It’s difficult to think of future generations, though, while you’re attending the various events that lead up to Pebble Beach (and the main event itself). This entire place is rooted in the past, and while that’s no bad thing in such a beautiful part of the world, we do need to keep looking forward as much as back.
As the automobile becomes more autonomous and drivers are forced from their seats by the computing systems being developed not far from here, these sorts of events will just become more important as chances to celebrate the story of the automobile and its future.
For Dickinson, the future is still bright. The cars that are “re-imagined” at his facility in Los Angeles are pretty much perfect marriages of new tech and traditional, classic design. Will there be a Singer on the lawn at Pebble Beach in years to come? I sincerely hope so, but for now, he needs to attend to the people swarming around his Quail stand. Orders have to be taken, dreams to be realised – and a broken arm isn’t going to stop him doing either.
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