Amelia Island, 15th of March 2015
Sunday 15th of March already saw the 20th edition of the annual
Concours d´Elegance at Amelia Island and in its jubilee year Bill
Warner and his organizing team could put another great event in
their history books. Over the last two decades the event in the
north of the sunshine state became the east-coast equivalent of
Pebble Beach in Monterey and the second biggest show for
classic cars in the US.
... MediaCenter Gallery with72 Peter Singhof images (Appetizer)
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After an unexpected sunny day a record crowd attended the show
field featuring more than 300 cars in 38 different classes lined up
at the 10th and 18th fairway of the golf course at the Ritz-Carlton.
As Amelia is much more sportive than other event of its kind it did
not just feature several sports and race car classes including rally
cars but again an honoured race driver, this year nobody less
than sir Stirling Moss. Although in the shadow of Fangio during
his Formula 1 career Moss is widely regarded as the most
complete driver of its era especially in sports car racing. Having
driven all the important marques including Aston Martin, Jaguar,
Maserati and Ferrari the display was a great selection of the best
sports racing cars of the 1950s and 60s like the Aston DBR1,
Maserati 450S and 250 F of the Ferrari 250 GTO. But Moss might
be linked especially to Mercedes-Benz (Sponsor of the Concours)
when he was not just part of the successful Silver Arrow team
with Fangio and Hermann but more important winning the Mille
Miglia with the only non-Italian car after the war with the record
run in the 300 SLR. Today the straight-eight is considered as one
of the most valuable car in existence and “722” rarely leaves the
works museum but certainly the classic centre brought over the
original car for Sir Stirling to enter the show field early in the
morning.
But the Moss cars were not the only special featured class as
this years edition celebrated Stutz with two separate classes, the
history of the hot rods both on the east and the west coast, again
three classes for the cars with the prancing horse including an
own F1 class and the BMW 328 including two of the original
1940s MM entered cars, the winning Touring Berlinetta and the
"Bügelfalte".
After a busy morning preparing and judging the cars the award
ceremony started early after lunch as a lot of class and special
awards had to be given during the afternoon. At about 5pm finally
the two best of show winning cars entered the awards area with
the Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Zagato of David Sydorick taking the
sports award and the stylish Cord L29 Brooks Stevens Speedster
of the Ed and Judy Schoenthaler Collection the elegance award.
Especially the second one was not predicted by many as some
favourites included the sensational Graber bodied Duesenberg J of
Sam Mann or the supercharged straight-six Mercedes-Benz with
coachwork by Armbruster brought over by Arturo Keller but at the
end the elegant black-white Cord convinced the Jury to take the
top laurels.
For the moment we have put together a small selection of
images, a more detailed report and extensive image galleries will
follow the next days.
Report & Images ...Peter Singhof
www.classiccarphotography.de
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