On the eighteenth fairway of the Pebble Beach Golf Links, facing the Pacific, there is a moment on the Sunday afternoon of Concours d’Elegance weekend when approximately 225 automobiles and several thousand spectators collectively hold their breath. The Best of Show trophy — presented by the judges’ chairman to a single vehicle selected from the day’s class winners — is about to be announced. For the car’s owner, the restorer who may have spent years on this moment, and the marque specialists who judged the field, this is not simply a competition result. It is a placement in automotive history.
The Best of Show trophy at Pebble Beach is the most coveted recognition in the collector car world. What it means, and what is required to receive it, has evolved dramatically across the event’s seven decades.
Origins: The First Years and the Earliest Standards
The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance began in 1950 as an adjunct to the Pebble Beach Road Races — a celebration of beautiful automobiles staged on the same iconic grounds where sports car racing was taking place. The first events were informal by modern standards, with judging that reflected the tastes and knowledge available at the time rather than the forensic precision that characterises contemporary evaluation.
Early Best of Show recognition went predominantly to contemporary luxury automobiles — American customs and coachbuilt European cars from the postwar period — rather than to pre-war classics or performance vehicles. The event’s original aesthetic was shaped by the coachbuilding culture of the immediate postwar decade, when custom bodywork on American platforms represented the apex of accessible luxury for a newly affluent California audience.
The trophy itself — a crystal and silver piece that has evolved in design over the decades — carried different weight in those early years. Winning was a matter of community recognition rather than financial consequence. The connection between Best of Show and significant auction value was a later development, one that arrived as the collector car market professionalised and as Pebble Beach’s reputation crystallised into the global institution it has become.
The Transition: Pre-War Cars and the Shift to Concours Tradition
Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, judging standards at Pebble Beach underwent a fundamental reorientation. Pre-war coachbuilt European automobiles — Hispano-Suiza, Duesenberg, Bugatti, Delage, and the great Italian carrozzeria work of the 1930s — began to dominate the field and to claim Best of Show recognition with increasing regularity. This shift reflected both the maturing knowledge base of American collectors and the growing influence of European concours tradition, which had long treated the great pre-war automobiles as the pinnacle of automotive art.
The judging criteria during this period emphasised originality, elegance of proportion, and the quality of coachbuilding — criteria that naturally favoured the great atelier work of the interwar period over more recent, more mass-produced automobiles regardless of their individual quality. A 1937 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic had no more chance of losing Best of Show to a 1965 Ferrari GTO than a Raphael has of losing an attribution contest to a skilled forger.
This was not snobbery as much as it was the establishment of an aesthetic hierarchy that the event’s growing prestige both reflected and reinforced.
How Judging Works: The Modern System
The contemporary Pebble Beach judging system is elaborate, specialist, and demanding in ways that the early events could not have accommodated. Each class is assigned a team of judges with specific marque expertise — the Alfa Romeo class is judged by Alfa specialists; the pre-war American class by people who have spent careers on Duesenberg or Packard provenance. This deep specialism means that the judging is conducted at a level of technical detail that a generalist observer might find bewildering.
Points are awarded across multiple dimensions: authenticity (does every component match the car’s original factory specification?), condition (the standard of preservation or restoration), and presentation (cleanliness, operational correctness, tyre condition, glass clarity). The point scales vary by class category, but the underlying philosophy is consistent: a car that is entirely authentic but imperfectly preserved is generally preferred to one that is perfectly presented but not entirely correct.
Class winners emerge from this process as the top-scoring car within their designated category. The Best of Show selection then involves a second evaluation in which class winners are assessed against each other by the full judging panel — a process that introduces an inherently subjective dimension, because comparing a 1934 Packard with custom coachwork to a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa prototype requires aesthetic judgment that transcends pure technical accuracy.
What Separates a Best of Show Winner
The question of what separates a Best of Show winner from a class winner who also scored near-maximum points is genuinely difficult to answer with precision, which is partly what makes it so compelling. Several factors emerge consistently from conversations with judges and from the pattern of historical winners.
Singular historical significance matters enormously. A car that is the sole surviving example of a particular coachbuilt configuration, or one that participated in a specific historical event of documented importance, carries a narrative weight that a numerically identical car in greater production cannot match. The 1928 Mercedes-Benz 680S Saoutchik Torpedo that won Best of Show in 2012 was not merely a beautifully preserved car — it was a specific artifact of a specific cultural moment in coachbuilding history.
Correctness at the component level has become increasingly important as the judge community’s technical knowledge has deepened. Modern judging can identify an incorrect bolt head, a period-inappropriate washer, or a gasket material that postdates the car’s construction year. Cars that have been restored to correct specification using period materials and period fasteners — rather than modern replacements that are functionally identical but technically wrong — score better, and that difference can accumulate to Best of Show significance.
Visual presence and aesthetic authority remain real factors even in a system ostensibly governed by technical criteria. A car must be, in some ineffable sense, the kind of object that commands a fairway. This does not override correctness, but it means that a technically perfect car in an understated colour combination is at a disadvantage relative to an equally correct car in a period colour that commands attention from across the grass.
The Evolution of Categories and What It Reveals
One of the most revealing aspects of Pebble Beach’s development is the evolution of its class structure. The addition of classes for post-war European sports cars, for coachbuilt Ferraris, for American customs, and most recently for design studies and concept cars reflects the judges’ committee’s understanding that automotive history is not static — that categories of cars which were not considered serious concours subjects in 1975 have now established their own historical claims.
The admission of post-1973 vehicles into competition — long resisted as a dilution of the pre-war and early postwar emphasis — acknowledged that the Ferrari GTO, the Lamborghini Miura, and their contemporaries had become historically significant in ways that warranted formal recognition. The subsequent Best of Show victories for Ferraris from the 1950s and 1960s have validated that inclusion without having displaced the pre-war cars as the most consistent source of top honours.
Conclusion
Winning the Pebble Beach Best of Show trophy is harder now than at any point in the event’s history — not because the cars are scarcer, but because the knowledge brought to bear on their evaluation is more comprehensive, more forensic, and more international in its reach than the founders of the 1950 event could have imagined. The trophy rewards a combination of historical significance, technical correctness, quality of preservation or restoration, and a certain ineffable authority of presence that no scoring system quite captures. For the cars that earn it, and the owners who receive it on the eighteenth fairway, it represents a moment of recognition that the collector car world has decided, over seventy-five years, to treat as permanent.
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