Car Connection - 11/22/19

The Art Center Car Classic has become one of the most prestigious car shows in the world. It has the uniqueness of marques as the world-famous Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance combined with the accessibility (and size) of a small parking lot car show. Attendance is low enough to actually allow one to get up and close to the vehicles. The vehicles are literally one-of-a-kind and often worth hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars.

I remember distinctly seeing one of my favorite cars, Steve McQueen’s brown 1963 Ferrari 250 GT Lusso, sitting alone on the grassy hillside. The show was ending and traffic was light enough that I lay beside the car and took a short nap, grateful to spend a few minutes alone with a dream crush. 

The car later sold for $10 million in 2014 at the Pebble Beach auction and nowadays one would be lucky to get within ten feet of that car if you can even find it in the wild. That kind of accessibility and trust with no velvet rope is unique to the Car Classic, a privilege practically no longer allowed by any car show of this caliber in the world. 

The Art Center Car Classic has an origin story as special as its uniqueness. This story comes from a former Art Center instructor, Dave O’Connell, who was the chief designer at Mitsubishi for 25 years. 

The story goes like this: 

During an automotive design class, an instructor lectures the class to take a look at the “pontoon-fender” of a Ferrari Testa Rossa (the 1950s one, not the 80s) and take a look at the form transitions. Frustrated by not knowing what the heck the instructor was referencing, a student raised their hand and said something like, “Great, where are we supposed to find that?” (For reference, a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa sold for $39.8 million in 2014)

The student had a point.

How are you suppose to witness these unique designs as a student, when the unique design is a $40 million dollar car probably locked away in some billionaire’s collection??

Funny enough, another fellow student mentioned that his father was part of the Ferrari Club. He offered to ask his father if the club would consider bringing up some classic Ferraris to the campus for the students to get a closeup. The club said yes and set a date.

The story doesn’t end there. 

Being that Art Center is proud of being home to one of the world’s most prestigious automotive design programs, word of the show spread to other instructors, who also worked at car design studios in Southern California. They thought, “Why not bring our concept cars for the students to see as well?” 

And they did, to the chagrin of the Ferrari Club. Party. Crashed!

The event was so spectacular and beneficial for the students that more car collectors joined in the year after and the show grew and grew. Within a few years, celebrities such as Jay Leno would become regular guests, and professional designers would come back to their alma mater and show off the craziest and wildest designs in automotive history, past, present, and future.

I always loved this story because this legacy was born of a combination of one’s audacity to ask a question and another’s generosity to help, and more people benefited from it all. It is an example of what can happen if one simply asks. The world is full of connections and social media has made that more clear than ever.

Share your dreams and your aspirations, and who knows, you may already know the person who can make it all come true, but you just haven’t told them yet.

Fuck yeah, it’s Friday!