The Pebble Beach® Concours d’Elegance Best of Show Winner 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports

The Pebble Beach® Concours d’Elegance broke new ground in 2024, naming this original and unrestored 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports as Best of Show, an unprecedented departure for a concours that has ever- (or almost ever-) honored bright and shiny over-restored visions of great, sleek, powerful classics.

At the Tour d’Elegance on Thursday morning – in my opinion the best event of the whole exhausting and over-excited Monterey week – it made its debut.

Identified as a 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports, even though the Type 59s were Grand Prix cars, it was achingly original with the original Bugatti Blue still showing through the black overpaint. The outside-laced wire wheels with the rims splined to the brake drums marked it as something special, a Type 59 GP although with a two-seat body and fenders.

Its originality and mechanical condition – it was, after all, going on the Tour d’Elegance through the Monterey Peninsula’s steep grades, tight curves and highways – were, among a field of obsessively restored cars, nearly singular.

The 1965 Serenissima 308V Fantuzzi Spyder, stored since its sole appearance at Le Mans in 1966 and making its debut here, was its only realistic counterpart for originality and significance. The Serenissima, though, didn’t have the successful racing history of this Bugatti in grands prix, winner at Pau in 1937 and later at Algeria and the Marne GPs driven by Jean-Pierre Wimille.

On the Pebble Beach fairway attention is focused on Duesenberg, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, Maserati (featured in 2024), Packard and the like. They are for the most part obsessively restored to beyond perfect condition, like carefully nurtured orchids trained to be at their best in mid-August.

The Type 59 was, by these standards, an ugly duckling.

Although it ran like a train the dull and diminished black overpaint was occasionally rubbed through to show its original Bugatti blue. The seats were burnished, faded and stretched. It was, as we sometimes say, “just a car”.

Yet it had presence, an aura of history and originality, a distinguished and known provenance.

The discussions in the Pebble Beach judges’ meeting must have been dynamic, challenging immaculate presentation with overwhelming originality and history.

Choosing an aged, cosmetically unrestored car for Best of Show at Pebble Beach is, at least since the show’s inception in the early 50’s, unprecedented.

Is it “right” to make a Preservation class car Best of Show? It reflects changing values and criteria, an appeal to make preservation (as advocated by collectors like Fred Simeone and Miles Collier) a primary objective.

Restoration erases a car’s history to replace it with bright chrome or brass trim, fastidiously wet-sanded clearcoat paint and fine leather and cloth with nary a wrinkle or scuff.

I took more photos of this Bugatti than any other car on the Pebble Beach field. I talked with its handler during the Tour lineup to learn its history. I loved it, but never would I have thought it would be Best of Show at Pebble Beach.

But this was the “right” decision, a daring one by the Pebble Beach Concours staff and judges, just as it was “right” for them to add a Preservation Class years ago to recognize the value of originality and lately to expand Preservation categories beyond a single class.

This is a watershed moment in car collecting.