A one-off and coachbuilt 1936 Packard and a 1963 Rolls-Royce took Best of Show honors at the second Las Vegas Concours, which likely was the first major such collector car competition held not on a golf course or ocean shore or lakefront park but in a baseball stadium.
The venue was the Las Vegas Ballpark, home since 2019 of the Las Vegas Aviators, the Triple-A minor league affiliate of the Oakland A’s. The ballpark provided the concours with spectator seating with a view of the cars on the fiel, and the huge Jumbotron screen with its various video features, air-conditioned hospitality suites for event sponsors, and other amenities not frequently offered at such collector car events.
The 1936 Packard won Best of Show Pre-War honors. It was built by Fernandez-Darrin for a Parisian playboy and was labeled by “Dutch” Darrin as the gentleman’s tailback speedster. The car is owned by Michael Sullivan of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and its current condition is the result of a 7,000-hour restoration by Packard and Duesenberg specialist Fran Roxas and his Vintage Motor Group facility in suburban Chicago.
The 1963 Rolls-Royce is a Silver Cloud III Mulliner drophead coupe and took Best of Show Post-War honors. As the story goes, Armand Hammer was in France for a business meeting, learned the person with whom he’d be negotiating was a car enthusiast, and so he purchased the Rolls-Royce and arranged for a chauffeur to pick him up for the meeting.
Not only was the host impressed with the car when it arrived at his estate, but we’re told he and Hammer became close friends.
After the meeting, Hammer and the chauffeur drove to Milan. The car was shipped from Genoa to New York, then put on the Union Pacific Railroad for delivery to Hammer’s home in Los Angeles, where it now is in the care of Michael Hammer, Armand Hammer’s grandson.
