When summer comes, it's time to park cars on the lawn.
But instead of the big concours d'elegance at Meadow Brook or Pebble Beach, we actually prefer the regional shows like Forest Grove near Portland, Oregon (been there), or the Palo Alto Concours d'Elegance near San Francisco (saw the very first one as a kid). Here in Los Angeles, our favorite is the Art Center College of Design's Car Classic.
Art Center's Car Classic has a friendly scale, and it gives you the opportunity to visit the school that trained some of the world's foremost automotive designers. Many of them return to L.A. just for this event, since more than a dozen major design studios are located in the region. And within the small sculpture garden of Art Center's upper campus, you always discover interesting cars that are otherwise hidden around town and also meet the locals who make the car hobby happen.
Car Classic '09 is featuring vintage airplanes and watercraft this year as well as a collection of automobiles, a good example of the eclectic approach that small events are willing to undertake. Scheduled for Sunday, 19 July, the event will host aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his innovative design for an ultralight car, and there will also be plenty of stuff you don't see every day, like a flying car from Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, a large-scale Raymond Loewy model for a locomotive, a 1967 Amphicar, and even TV Tommy Ivo's Barnstormer dragster of the 1950s.
When you'd done the dress-up thing to see dead cars on the lawn, a summer Sunday spent at a small, relatively informal concours like the Art Center Classic gives you a chance to see cars that you've never seen before and to rediscover the reasons why you like to look at cars in the first place.
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