Although the biggest action on the Monterey Peninsula starts Friday with the Quail, Gordon McCall’s Motorworks event at the Monterey Jet Center is the traditional kickoff to the cavalcade of automotive hedonism set to consume the south end of Monterey Bay this week.
A fest for those with fistfuls of dollars and diamonds, McCall’s event occupies two hangars packed with luxury goods, snacks, and vehicles, as well as a sizable slab of adjacent tarmac with automobiles scattered among various forms of aircraft.
A quick meander around the grounds and through the hangars revealed a fresh retro-fab Porsche 964 from Rob Dickinson’s Singer Vehicle Design; a low, lean 906—the last of Porsche’s roadgoing sports racers—a pair of Pagani Zondas; and classics ranging from the F40-predecessor Ferrari 288GTO Evoluzione to a Toyota 2000GT.
This year’s event was heavy on the sporting end of luxury lifestyle automobiles, with nothing so raucously outlandish as Fatty Arbuckle’s mad, purple 1919 Pierce-Arrow, a car that made a showing during the 2012 event. We were, however, treated to the jet whine of the ex–Graham Hill Lotus 56, the machine that led turbines to be legislated off the grid at Indianapolis in 1968.
The dragstrip-focused Ford Thunderbolt, a factory special Fairlane with lightweight body parts and a big-block 427 wedged between its fiberglass fenders, was a hoot to see among all the rarefied European machinery, as was the Grim Reaper, a P-51D Mustang parked nearby.
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Perhaps the most surprising car at the Jet Center this year was Toyota’s FT-1 concept. Resplendent in subdued gray, rather than the searing red of its Detroit reveal, the latest iteration of the curvaceous Toyota looked absolutely comfortable among seemingly headier new iron. Which means one of two things: either Toyota is making up for lost mojo or modern supercars are less aesthetically stimulating than their raw-boned forebears. We suspect both are at play. Further investigation is required. Luckily, the week’s just begun.
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