m
MOTORSPORTS
Tour
d’Elegance
T
here’s one thing you’ll notice when perusing the
18th fairway at Pebble Beach during the Concourse
d”Elegance, the most famous classic car competition
in the world. The cars are all parked. It’s the spectators
and judges who must move among them until the very end, when the
winners are announced.
For many years, a completely free alternative to see these cars
in action has existed in the form of the Tour d’Elegance, in which
a caravan of rare and collectible automobiles embark on a scenic
tour along the California coastline. Enthusiastic spectators stake out
positions along the route, where they sit in folding chairs, camera in
hand, recording the caravan of rare and vintage autos as they pass
by. For those who might not have expected the Tour, it must surely
be a surprising sight, the rattling and humming of antique chassis
and engines slowly making their way along the coast.
Rolex serves as a title sponsor of four of the internationally
recognized events that comprise what has become known as the
Monterey Classic Car Week. In addition to the main event—the
Concourse d’Elegance—there is the Quail, a less formal car
competition held at the Quail Lodge and Golf Club; the Monterrey
Motorsports Reunion, a series of races held at Laguna Seca; and
the Tour d’Elegance.
For this year’s Tour, we hitched a ride with classic car collector
Bill Kuettel in his 1928 Lincoln V8, a chauffer-driven beauty commissioned by the former Peruvian Ambassador to France at the cost
of $8,000 (or approximately $160,000 in today’s money), making it
the costliest Lincoln ever manufactured.
Bill, a gregarious and spry retiree in his 80s, piloted his prized
Lincoln over the 60-mile course while regaling his passengers with
stories about his car, his life and the watch on his wrist, an ultrathin Rolex Cellini.
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WRISTWATCH | 2016
Bill proudly showed me his watch, which I’d been admiring as
he guided his prized Lincoln through along the California coastline.
He told me of how he purchased it through the sale of an older
Rolex he had bought in Switzerland while stationed in Germany following World War Two.
Bill wasn’t certain which model it was he had owned prior, but
he described it as a fairly straightforward, manually wound stainless steel infantry watch. I was more than a little surprised that Bill
would have sold a watch bought as a young serviceman overseas in
order to finance a new horological acquisition, but he does love his
Cellini and didn’t seem the least bit sen timental about the watch
that was. To him, the modern Cellini was a new gold watch, and