Real BAT cars at Concorso Italiano 2009
(All photos: Gene Ritvo/Boston.com)
By Peter Bourassa, Boston.com Correspondent
Held the Friday before the more serious Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, Concorso Italiano has always been a sort of "people's car show" filled with hundreds of predominantly bright red street cars from the Italian California car clubs.
At Laguna Seca Golf Ranch, there were corrals full of Porsches, Corvettes and Honda NSXs in addition the Italians. While some argue that nothing succeeds like excess, in this case, the excess of cars and vendors diminished the importance of the special cars on display and detracted from the exclusively Italian village theme so long a part of this event's success.
The show's highlights were the 1950s Alfa Romeo Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnicas, a futuristic Bertone styling exercise best known by their acronym as BAT cars. A significant number group of Ferrari 288 GTOs were also impressive because relatively few were made. A huge number of late model Ferraris were less impressive for the opposite reason.
Peter Bourassa runs mmrsite.com and can be reached at Peter@mmrsite.com.
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