Concours d'LeMons: Living a different kind of automotive lifestyle

The “winner” was perhaps the worst car I'd ever seen. The 1980 French KV Mini looked like something made in a backyard by a 10-year-old. This thing was not going to pass government standards in any country in the world. Though it is street-legal in France. Regardless, at the end of the day, the KV sputtered off with the coveted Worst in Show award at the first annual Concours d'LeMons, the anti-Pebble, held safely miles away from Pebble Beach on the road to Salinas, Calif.

I was there because my colleagues higher up on the masthead (and you'll notice everybody is higher up on the masthead) did not want to dignify this show with cov-erage in the magazine. But this is my column, and I can cover whatever I want! Ha!

So I went to LeMons, where awfulness is a virtue, bad engineering is considered good, ugly is to the bone. I strolled amid the wheeled vermin, only occasionally having to avert my eyes from the worst of it. Surprisingly, most of those were from the '70s.

Kevin Williams had a really solid excuse for buying a 1978 custom van, the one with orange and brown pinstripes straight from the factory. “We were drunk,” the proud owner of the “Shag Van” reminisced. And when someone told him about Concours d'LeMons, he felt that he must be there, even though, as he said, “I'm not really a big car-show guy, per se.” I liked the “per se.”

Williams's van was one of an amazing 90 repulsive piles that proudly braved the dirt lots of Toro Park. The Ford Pintos were most popular. There was a full corral of them parked facing outward in a semicircle, “so no one would rear-end anyone,” a painful reference to the car's penchant for exploding when it was hit from behind.

My eye was drawn as if by radioactive magma to the Mercury Bobcat (i.e., Pinto) of Sandy Edelstein and Scott King. “Unfortunately, one of our habits is to troll eBay, and this sort of popped up,” said Edelstein.

King admitted that at $5,000, the car represented “maybe the upper band of the Pinto realm.” Who knew the Pinto realm had an upper band? Edelstein displayed for the judges the real “Color and Upholstery” book used by dealers to order Pinto trim packages--shockingly similar to scenes that would play out one day and several levels of culture later at Pebble Beach.

Proud owner Mike Streets showed me documentation that ensured that his Boss Pinto was of the “provenance” that would set it apart for the (possibly) inebriated judges. Streets claimed it was his car, at a show two years ago, that drew the eye of LeMons organizer Alain Galbraith. “He fell in love with it. He said, ‘I gotta do a show for all these weird cars,'” Streets said.

“It's a fantastic show,” said Galbraith, soberly.

Unlike the rest of the Monterey weekend's activities, LeMons had no parking issues, a taco truck replaced trays of oysters and flutes of champagne, and instead of a crystal Trophee, the winner got a wooden sign that looked like a high-school shop project. It read simply “Worst in Show.”

It was a truly awful afternoon. In a good way.

By Mark Vaughn