Italian curves and British racer lead awards at 30th Amelia Concours

A slim British race car campaigned by a legendary Scottish Formula 1 driver and a rare and curvaceous Italian cabriolet owned by another iconic racer won Best of Show awards at the 30th iteration of The Amelia Concours d’Elegance over the weekend.

And despite bad weather that forced the classic car event to be held a day early, thousands flocked to the show on Saturday in and around the Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island under a mix of sun, clouds and a brief shower to see 200-plus two- and four-wheeled conveyances show their stuff.

Best of Show – Concours d’Elegance was a blue 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2.9 , the only one bodied by Farina, with a supercharged 2.9-liter Grand Prix engine. Italian racing champion Giuseppe Farina ordered the car that’s part of California’s Keller Collection.

Alejandro Tonda-Keller was amazed to win the top award.

“I generally don’t believe it. I think my grandfather would be so proud of what we have done, and I do think he’s just watching us and happy to see his legacy carried on as we take these cars to new events and show them off,” Keller said. “This restoration is actually from 1995, if you can believe that.”

Best of Show – Concours de Sport was the 1967 Lotus 49 debuted by the legendary Jimmy Clark, where it won at multiple tracks like Silverstone and Watkins Glen. And now it won again.

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“It’s been my favorite race car of all time,” owner Keith MacAllister said. “Blow me down – I just came here to have fun, and I am surprised. Delighted.”

For McKeel Hagerty, whose automotive lifestyle group acquired the Concours’ rights in mid-2021 from Jacksonville resident and founder Bill Warner, it remains “an honor” to keep The Amelia alive in an oceanfront corner of Nassau County.

“They bring people from all over the world. They bring cars from all over the world. And when you get that kind of gravity together, it’s just a catalyst to bring the car world together,” said Hagerty, who had many favorites this weekend. ” It’s the racer’s concours. But it’s always that twinkle-in-the-eye car that I think makes everybody smile. So when you see a three-wheel Davis, or you see something that’s really special, like one of the great Alfa 2.9s over there, some of the great classic cars come out to strut their stuff.”

The Amelia was founded in 1996 by Bill Warner, a Jacksonville collector and magazine photographer. The automotive charity event is held each March at The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, and at the 10th and 18th fairways of the Golf Club of Amelia Island.

The event annually honors a famous racer and his cars, from Stirling Moss and Richard Petty to Roger Penske. This year, four-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves was honored, with two of his Indy 500 racers on display.

“It is an honor. I feel blessed,” Castroneves told Jacksonville Today. “People don’t realize that these machines behind me – I don’t see them very often, actually. When you are working and you win, they take it away and someone has a special place to have it. So for me, being reunited with these amazing machines, it brings me amazing memories.”

Dozens of race cars were on display on the grass on Saturday, including many International Race of Champions racers that put great drivers together in televised competition between 1974 and 2006, starting with the Porsche 911 RSR, and including Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Trans Ams.

Warner had a race-modified 1978 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 campaigned by Formula 1 champion Niki Lauda during race at Riverside International Raceway. But it did not finish because of a dispute between Lauda’s Formula 1 boss and the co-founder of the IROC series, Warner said.

“Lauda had a contract with Penske. And he had a contract with Ecclestone,” Warner said. “He had to figure out how to honor both contracts. So he got into this car and gave it a clutch job in three laps. And they knew he did it intentionally because he already filed his flight plan to leave, then left the track and was out of Los Angeles. That makes for interesting story on the car.”

Another racecar nearby was a recreated 1912 American Racing Special brought by Darrel Cole, sitting tall on 12-spoke wooden wheels, massive twin chains driving the rears. Cole says it is an exact recreation of a true Brass Era race car, built by a good friend to show what once was, and winner of a Special Hagerty Award.

“I have always loved racing all my life,” the Amelia Island resident said. “After hearing the whole story about the car and what it took to build it and all the research — 14 years to come up with this masterpiece — is pretty phenomenal.”

One row of classics included Rob Kaufman’s 1934 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 short chassis straight 8, which won that year’s 24 hours of Le Mans endurance race. The sleek blue race car is no trailer queen at age 91, he said.

“This was the hottest rod you could buy,” Kaufman said. ” … We’ve done thousands of miles of rallies with this and it’s a great car to drive. It’s really comfortable for what it is. We had it at 115 mph on Le Mans’ Mulsanne Straight. It still goes.”

An automotive movie icon was across the show field – an exact recreation of the 1965 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Secret Agent 007 in the early James Bond films. (Though owner Joe Kaminkow’s DB5’s pop-out guns were firing blanks all day during the concours.) It has an ejection seat and all the other goodies seen in the 1960’s Bond movies, said K.C. Crawford of Kevin Kay Restorations.

“It is the most correct recreation of the Bond series car. The customer really wanted a real DB5 that he could drive on the street, and have all the working gadgets,” Crawford said.

Along with the Formula 1 racecars, Porsche and Corvette racecars and high-end exotic Ferraris, there was the wild golden Deora, which began life as a 1965 Dodge A100 pickup truck and was heavily customized by Mike and Larry Alexander for the 1967 Detroit Autorama.

Dave DeVries is the current custodian of a custom hot rod many remember from almost 60 years ago.

“A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I had this as a model,’ or ‘I saw this in 1967 when it debuted!’ It is a crowd favorite,” DeVries said, detailing how to get in it. “You do it from the front – the windshield lifts up, and then the front grill kind of pivots, then you walk into the front.”

The Amelia’s economic impact is estimated at $30 million-plus a year, filling hotel rooms from Jacksonville to Camden County, Georgia. The event also has generated more than $4 million in donations to Community Hospice & Palliative Care, Spina Bifida of Jacksonville and Shop with Cops in its first 29 years.

Peter Brock, who designed the Cobra Daytona racecars and co-designed the 1963 Corvette, has been a judge for all these years. He said Warner’s original idea has remained an “iconic event.”

“This is the East Coast event,” Brock said. “The Pebble Beach Concours is the big thing on the West Coast. But the great thing about this event is when Bill started it, it was a car guys’ show, and it still is a car guys’ show. And that’s the thing that I like about it: It is so eclectic, and far more informal, and a lot of fun with so many different cars.”