Priceless Ferrari pair were once-in-a-lifetime sight at Pebble Beach Concours

The only danger was satiation. And it happened too but, happily for me, just at the right time. It was time to leave the concours, laid out across the unimprovable location of the Pebble Beach lawns to the distant cries of sea birds wheeling the skies above the Pacific. I was with my nephew who works for an auction house on the West Coast. We walked off the grass, across a small parking area to where my transport to the airport awaited. As we did we passed an inexpertly parked Bugatti Chiron in one of the bays. Neither of us even mentioned it. Here, a car one would have walked and probably run across a busy street to see in any other setting was barely worth a glance. It was that kind of event.

Even those like me lucky enough to have been before would likely struggle to comprehend the sight that presented itself as you departed the Pebble Beach Lodge, onto the lawn and surveyed the scene.

The chances of seeing the like anywhere else again? Near enough zero

It was hard to know where to start and time was short, so a spot of strategy was required: a lightning roam around the arena to identify what was there, followed by a surgical strike, zooming in on the cars that really mattered, distinguishing between impressively shiny cars you might nevertheless stumble across elsewhere and those you could spend the rest of your life failing to clamp eyes on again.

Perhaps the most eye-catching category were the wedges, which formed so much of the supercar design language of the 1970s and ‘80s. For me two stood out: first the Bertone (note not Lancia) Stratos HF Zero, a car so low that, as the story goes, when Nuccio Bertone drove it over to Lancia to try to persuade them to make something quite like it, he simply drove straight under the barrier that would otherwise have denied him entry.

Then there was the Ferrari 512-powered Modulo, from rival company Pininfarina, conceived at the same time (1970) as the Zero but first shown in Geneva rather than Turin. I recall the four year-old me seeing it and concluding that not only was it the most modern, spectacular looking car there had ever been, but it was the most modern, spectacular looking car there would ever be. Over half a century later I am still not sure I was wrong about that.

But concept cars, while extraordinary to look at, perform no further function and I was drawn just as much to the wonderful idea of pairing road and racing examples of the first-generation hypercars that essentially saved sports car racing in the mid-1990s. It’s astonishing to think it’s 30 years since the BPR race series sent us flocking to Le Mans to see modified street machines in with a chance of winning the race outright. They may not have gone quite so fast as the Group C machinery they replaced, but when they looked and sounded that good, I’m not sure any of us really cared.

There were street and competition specification versions of the Bugatti EB110, Ferrari F40, Jaguar XJ220 and, of course, the McLaren F1. Particularly poignant for me was that the road F1 was the fourth of five prototypes built to develop the car. I’d last seen it on May 2, 1994 when, during the course of routine testing, it took me past 200mph for the first time, not stopping until I ran out of nerves and runway at 211mph. It was weirdly emotional to see a car that had played such a formative role in my motoring education for the first time in over three decades.

I was amazed too to see an entire fleet of the late Queen’s Land Rovers and Range Rovers on the lawn, not least because it was the first time they’d ever been seen outside the UK, and I was mesmerised by prototypes like the Mercedes-Benz C-111 and BMW Turbo Concept which look like they could have been designed last week, not well over half a lifetime ago.

And then I found the Ferraris. It was a struggle to be torn away from just staring at the 275GTB/4 NART Spyder, one of just 10 cars built for the US market by Ferrari at the request of the legendary Luigi Chinetti. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the world having that kind of clout in Maranello. But actually, it was the sight of what looked like three P4s lined up together that I’ll remember for the rest of my days. On closer examination it turned out that two were true P4s – so half of all production – and one a 412P (a quarter of all production), which is a customer-specification P4 lacking one valve per cylinder and using carburettors rather than fuel injection. Their value? Incalculable. The chances of seeing the like anywhere else again? Near enough zero. It was one of those moments you felt blessed just to be there.

But then there were the Bugattis. The modern ones are incredible in their own way and anyone doubting the prices charged could ever justify the product bought should go to Molsheim and see them in build, but for me Bugatti’s pre-war cars are inviolate, and examples of my favourite road and race cars were on the Pebble lawn too. The road car is the Type 55, a car of quite exquisite beauty in its shape and utterly awesome potential in its engineering. By taking the 2.3-litre supercharged straight-eight motor from the Type 51 Grand Prix car and putting it in a form of such simple, elegant beauty, Bugatti created what is to my mind the greatest pre-war road car of them all. But actually, my eyes were drawn still further by the 1934 Type 59, the car that won the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa that year and which survives today in unchanged form since 1937.

I have a personal interest insofar as the car was owned until four years ago by my old friend Hubert Fabri but the best thing about it, and its presence on the Pebble Beach lawn, unrestored and still showing all its old war wounds is that it won Car of the Show against probably the most formidable opposition ever gathered together on one patch of grass. In doing so it also became the first car from the ‘preservation’ category ever to win the top award. And thoroughly deserved it was too.