The Concours d’Elegance of America, which started a long, long time ago, 41 years, as the Meadow Book Concours d’Elegance at the Dodge mansion north of Detroit, has moved, and moved on.
Now located on the golf course at the former St. John’s monastery west of Detroit in Plymouth, it has blossomed over the past few years into a four-day weekend similar to those at Pebble Beach and Amelia Island.
One of the new features is the Saturday morning Cars & Coffee event, free and open to the public, that uses the entire front parking lot to house hundreds of interesting cars and trucks for a few hours.
This is Detroit. That means that there are thousands of people here whose lives and livelihoods are wrapped around cars and trucks, and the level of enthusiasm at an event like this is enormous. It took 30 minutes of sitting in traffic to get onto the property at 8 o’clock in the morning.
LBI is the overall sponsor, with participation from Hagerty and from the M1 Concourse race track and garage facility in Pontiac. There’s an automotive art show going on inside the building, and a much, much bigger automotive art show here in the parking lot.
This is Detroit, which means thousands of young men and women who work in the business during the week also enjoy the car hobby on the weekends, and it seems like they are all here today.
We didn’t find any brass cars on the parking lot. They will be on the show field tomorrow. But we did find a substantial number of machines from the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, plenty of Sixties muscle cars, and a huge number of British, German and Japanese imports.
Yes, the 2020 Corvette Stingray was there, along with several third-generation Ford GTs.
Altogether, it was a delightful experience in perfectly hot Michigan summer weather, just machinery, no politics, no classes, no trophies, everything from rat rods to Ferraris and McLarens, and we loved it.
